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July 7, 2002
Batting on the same side
How should the media report a war? Lt Gen V.R. Raghavan laments the failure of the media to ask informed questions about a conflict and the government’s reasons for continuing
The media has come a long way from Delaney’s thundering injunction that “it is no part of the duties of the press to share the burdens of statesmanship”. Delaney was the editor of the Times in London, 150 years ago. The role of the media has changed substantially since Delaney’s days. Today,
in most civilized societies debate on these (national security) issues is initiated and sustained by the media ... We cannot have informed discussions in Parliament without the media covering foreign and security issues adequately ... (but) do our MPs know? Does our political class care? It does not.
There is dearth of balanced media coverage on the reasons for governments continuing with conflicts which can be ended, or their compulsions for not ending them. Siachen has suffered from this imbalanced coverage since long. There is much that has been written by well-known journalists on the Siachen. They have argued the merits of the Indian case, or of talks which almost succeeded or even suggested ways to end the conflict. Few have questioned the government’s compulsions to continue a conflict. The good news is that among enlightened political leaders there is now a growing realization that ‘media has a critical role to play. The print media, especially the regional and small newspapers, must inform and debate issues of national security’.
While there is media apathy about initiating a debate on the merits of continuing a conflict, there is at times inaccurate reportage.
However, at times, there are adverse reactions from readers to even objective stories. Time magazine carried a story in its July 17, 1989 edition about the conditions on the Saltoro and the way Indian and Pakistani soldiers respond to the extraordinary challenges there. The story evoked a strange response from a reader in West Germany who wrote,
‘‘... soldiers who defy the elements with an iron will ... wars are always senseless but these men kill one another over a slice of uninhabitable wilderness. The conflict indicates little human reason or wisdom....”
It is the soldiers who get blamed for conflicts continued through political compulsions. It is a price they pay for continuing to do their duty while others judge the political correctness of their actions. The soldier on the Saltoro, whether Indian or Pakistani, is intelligent enough to sense the moral and ethical issues raised by the public and the media. He is well aware of his duty and the oath of loyalty to the state, taken when he joined the service. There is no point in blaming the soldiers of fighting on the Saltoro.
The Siachen conflict has been interpreted in different ways by the media. The illustrated Weekly once carried an interesting simile on Siachen. Writing about the admission of Rahul Gandhi, the heavily protected son of Rajiv Gandhi, into St Stephens College at Delhi, the writer said, “The security man upsets me because ... and then the entire campus could be something like Siachen, a zone of high security and high patriotism.” When Benazir Bhutto was mired in political difficulties as the prime minister, a senior scholar was convinced that Indian concessions on Siachen might have saved her. He wrote, “Rajiv did nothing to help Benazir — not even a pull out from Siachen.”
The armed forces’ perspective on the role of the media is ambivalent. They would like to get credit for their effort and sacrifices; they also want their demands to be understood; and they have no apparent problem with the media’s attention to military shortcomings. On the other hand, there are some who wish to use the media for the state’s propaganda purposes. In a National Security Paper titled “Mass Media and National Security”, a case has been made out in favour of this.
The paper acknowledges the enormous power and reach of the mass media. Its author goes on to conclude that, “maintenance of public morale is part of the security of the public. To fulfil this function, a psychological approach to the use of propaganda is necessary. The mass media could be used for propaganda purposes by the National Security Agencies”. This would come as a surprise to many but is an indicator of the harsher view in the defence services of the role of the media. The military’s doubts on the value of the intrusive and close media involvement is not new....
In the Crimean war, General Wolseley described the media as, “the newly invented curse to armies”. It was the press, however, which exposed the follies of that disastrous campaign which, in turn, led to a major reorganization of the British Army.
The world over, there has been a change in perception on the media’s role during conflicts. It is believed that greater transparency from the armed forces can only be to their advantage. Armed forces in India and elsewhere are slow to accept that view. The operations in the Falklands, Granada, Iraq during the Desert Storm, and even the long years of the Vietnam war were marked by a reluctance to share the latest information with the media. The speed with which news can be transmitted is both an advantage and a nuisance. In the Falklands, the British mediamen were present on the naval warships which, in turn, were being attacked by the Argentinean air force. It became known later that the Argentinean pilots on return from combat sorties would switch on to the BBC, to immediately get the results of their strikes from the correspondents who filed the story from on board the attacked ships.
The speed of modern communications and backpack satellite antennas have made the media compulsive about getting the news out instantly. Defence services all over prefer operational plans and actions to be secure from unpredictable influences. This is to ensure that operational objectives are attained as planned and also to minimize casualties. The media and the armed forces are therefore placed in a potentially adversarial situation. The better and confident military leaders strive to minimize its effects. They become ‘media savvy’ and dole out information crumbs with great elan. The evening media briefing was devised for this game of make-believe, where much was said and little given away. It came into its own in the long Vietnam years and was known as the ‘Five O’clock Follies’. Writing about this, one of the best known correspondents of that war, observed,
“.... there was a large group of correspondents coming back from the briefing, standard diurnal informational freak-o-rama, Five O’clock Follies, Jive at Five, war stories; at the corner they broke formation and went to their offices to file, we watched them, the wasted clocking the wasted.” The operations in Kargil also led to regular evening press briefings at New Delhi. There were similar briefings during the aerial bombings in Kosovo by Nato. In all these, the struggle between the establishment to conceal and the media to get the system to reveal information was palpable.
In assessing the Indian media’s role in spreading awareness about the Siachen conflict, one cannot fault it on its enthusiasm to ‘report’ the happenings. It could not have done otherwise, in view of the journalists’ adage about ‘a good firefight is going to get in over a good pacification story’. Editors love combat news and footage; peace is often worth no more than an afterthought. Indian media has reported combat accurately and objectively. It has, however, not done enough to influence the public and the government on the need and relevance of the conflict. It has watched without questioning, Siachen becoming a subtext and a part of the larger conflict in Jammu and Kashmir. A small-sized tactical action thus became a runaway military conflict growing both in size and intractability.
The compulsions of successive governments to enlarge and sustain the conflict over a decade and a half were not vigorously challenged in the media. Heroic tales and high valour were eulogized, but without asking hard questions about the need for expending such heroism. As a media analyst once wrote, the use of ‘cavalry metaphors” fires the imagination of the public but equally effectively clouds the political judgement of the leadership. Michael Herr, a journalist who covered Vietnam, wrote,
“Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional fire power could win it, all it could do was to take ... profound event(s) ... and make it into a communications pudding in which the right ingredients were used to create the wrong results.”
The Indian media did the defence services proud by its ability to observe accurately and report skillfully the difficult job soldiers were doing on the Saltoro. But by maintaining a long-term perspective on the meaning and implications of this continuing conflict it could have done much more. However, there is an unwillingness, not just in the Indian media, to grapple with the establishment on thorny issues of policy. Commenting on this, a noted journalist wrote, “In foreign affairs, the media and the establishment bat on the same side.”
Excerpted with permission from
Siachen: conflict without end
By Lt Gen V.R. Raghavan
Viking, Penguin Books, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India.
Website: www.penguinbooksindia.com
ISBN 0-47-004922-0
240pp. Indian Rs395
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