ANGLO-Saxon journalists, it seems, have dominated the last 50 years of news coverage by foreign correspondents in South Asia.
The editors of Foreign Correspondent Fifty Years of Reporting South Asia make other compelling points to ponder about peripatetic journalists in this absorbing compilation of news, features and analyses published abroad.
A foreign correspondent, according to them, is someone who tries to “inform people across the world about the complexities of the region, to expose what is wrong, cruel and criminal, as well as to celebrate what is good and successful.” At one point in the introduction to the book, there is the disarming confession to pre-empt arriving at misgivings about the authors.
“We are aware that many of the voices heard in this book have a strong Anglo-Saxon accent. We would have liked to bring in more pieces by colleagues from China, Japan, Eastern Europe and elsewhere, whose presence in South Asia has increased in the last 15 years or so. But over the whole of the last half-century, it has been journalists from Britain and America, plus the Commonwealth and a few European countries, who have formed the largest contingent of South Asia correspondents and who therefore dominate this book.”
A not entirely unjustifiable view, nevertheless, is that a dominant Anglo-Saxon component was not the only feature which made foreign correspondents of yore fairer than, say, the homegrown counterparts from within South Asia, particularly when it came to analysing socially-riven issues on the beat.Indian Dalit leaders have told me, for example, that the foreign media represents their cause more objectively as they don`t carry the baggage of centuries old caste prejudices, a malaise the local media is ever so vulnerable to. They cite the fact that at the last count there wasn`t a single Dalit journalist in the mainstream media in India. I am not aware if this has changed in any significant way in recent years.
Foreign correspondents are of course as fallible and gullible as any of us. While someone`s geographical location or ethnicity should not be a hindrance to objective reporting there are other ways for distortions to find a way.
Take for example the philosophical description of democracy, as many a westerner sees it, replete with its unshakeable allegiance to a particular economic worldview. Ever so often this worldview becomes the touchstone for moral judgments among the noblest of journalists. And that perhaps is why there used to be two and not one foreign correspondents` clubs in Delhi, divided as they were along the contours of the Cold War, which was as much about economic worldview as it was about political ideology.
An obsessive pursuit of the `market moving story` — how the coffee crop suffered in the Rwanda massacres — and covering wars as embedded journalists from aboard `friendly` army tanks have prompted questions to be asked about the essential morality of the so many correspondents who practise it.
In the Murdochian era of media ownership, multimedia mergers and so on, quality journalism shows up as a huge relief, an exception. Exigencies of the market have compelled many a stalwart to be tamed, if occasionally, also be put on the short leash. A major news agency I worked with would describe Mumbai`s rightwing Hindu Shiv Sena as fascist.
After Mr Manmohan Singh introduced his economic reforms, the agency became increasingly involved in the business of real-time market stories, its news coverage becoming just a sweetener to its main focus.
And slowly Shiv Sena stopped being fascist — it became Hindu zealot and eventually acquired the halo of being a Hindu nationalist group. Compulsions of the market had changed the lexicon, the very terms of reference of agreeable and mostly fair journalism.
Philosophical insights into the rise of the Hindu right in India are published extensively in the Indian media. However, when it comes to the actual coverage of spot reports about a communal conflagration, there seem to be strong forces that deter fair coverage. How else can we explain a bomb blast that occurred in the communally sensitive industrial city of Kanpur, and which went virtually unreported? The main newspapers and TV channels blacked out the story if they didn`t miss it by incompetence.
Were it not for the Hindi Dainik Jagaran and the Urdu Roznama Sahara, we would not know that on Sunday two suspected Hindu extremists of the Bajrang Dal were killed when the bomb they were apparently assembling went off. The incident occurred when the Hindu festival of Janmashtami was being celebrated.
The reports suggested that the bombs were to be used to trigger an anti-Muslim backlash. Rights activist Teesta Setalvad and so many others have been discussing a catalogue of similar incidents from Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu where suspected Hindu extremists were killed or injured while making bombs. The Kanpur explosion story carried pictures of police gathering evidence at the devastated site.
For this alone Edward Gargan`s report on the Mumbai riots of 1993 he wrote for The New York Times is possibly the most important contribution carried in the compilation of reports from 50 years. The report makes a point or two about the silence if not complicity of the Indian media in that sordid episode. Gargan wrote on Feb 4, 1993 “Now, as quiet settles in the city, the full dimensions of the violence are becoming increasingly clear, although many details — including transcripts of police radio transmissions and other evidence showing that the police took part in the anti-Muslim violence — have not been printed in Indian newspapers or magazines.” That is a damning thing to say, but is not the only thing Gargan remarks on.
“Transcripts of conversations between the police control room and officers on the streets, taken from regular police radio band and made available to The New York Times by an Indian reporter, show that the officers at police headquarters repeatedly told constables in the field to allow Muslim homes to burn and to prevent aid from reaching victims.”
What conclusions can we draw from the two quotes from Gargan`s report? Perhaps we can assert that not only was the Indian media silent but that there was at least one well-meaning reporter who had the crucial transcripts but either didn`t have the courage or the platform to make them public.
Whatever the conclusions, it is equally a fact that fair journalism is not the monopoly of any particular ethnic or geographical group, even if Gargan`s bold and objective story allows us to question this axiom. But Gargan wrote his story before 9/11 happened and the best of us put on blinkers that were prescribed as mandatory by the powers that be. All the more reason to celebrate the dying breed of fair journalists.
The writer is Dawn`scorrespondent in Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com