Missing in action: TV news anchors REPLY TO ALL
Media’s hypocrisy on India-China stand-off and the sense of victimhood among people are because of successive govts hiding the real issue
Afriend from the media made an interesting observation: Coverage of the stand-off with China is absent. Not in print, which retains its integrity to some extent and certainly it is more independent than television. What he meant is the absence from this fray of our brave news anchors. They are usually keen to go to war with Pakistan but they are missing in action from this skirmish against China. Why? He felt that they were told by the government to not aggravate a situation that is delicate and could be undone by excessive national emotion.
That is why there’s neither song nor dance nor heat and certainly not much light on this scuffle that’s going on in the mountains. If it were the Pakistani soldiers that we were grappling with, the channels would be lit up incandescent with rage. The reason this hasn’t happened is that the government or “agencies” (a word long popular in Pakistan and now being heard in our country also, alas!) must have made a few calls.
I found it interesting, though not surprising, that the channels could thus be manipulated. This is for a variety of reasons. One is that many are genuinely ideologically aligned to Hindutva. They are comfortable with a certain level of violence against other Indians and all the other joys that this ideology is bringing us. Another is that many are dependent to a large extent on state advertising. With big spends coming from social programmes such as Swachh Bharat, this has been even more the case in recent years.
I also think, while I stand for and want to see press freedom, it is a good thing that the channels are not whipping up a frenzy on such issues. Foreign affairs and border disputes are a specialised field. Popular politics is not the domain for this because only a handful of people have control over the material and truly understand the subject. We can damage ourselves if we are forced into action or inaction on the basis of popular pressure that is not informed. And so, again while I stand for and want to see media freedom in absolute terms, and I can observe the channels’ hypocrisy, I am fine with the lack of frenzy.
However, there is another way in which this problem can be tackled in the long term. It is one that no government, whether the Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party or any other has tried. And that is to be transparent. Our nationalism and cartography are the products of a mythology that is embedded quite firmly in us. The flexibility available to a government for give and take on this is quite limited. The Opposition will immediately level allegations of softness or treachery and the pressure will be hard to absorb without damage.
Is the report by Henderson Brooks and P S Bhagat on the war of 1962, limited as it was by its remit, kept hidden from Indians because it embarrasses the army? I don’t think so. It remains concealed because it reveals that the Chinese may not have been totally to blame. I think it embarrasses the state and its narrative of victimhood.
Jawaharlal Nehru, with his ideas on non-alignment, is thought to have been an idealist softie on international issues. Totally false. On border issues, he was a nationalist (I use the word in the pejorative sense) as we know the word today. He assumed the same position on our borders as the aggressively expansionist imperial state he inherited. This is according to the man who has written about the issue longest and best, the journalist Neville Maxwell.
In any case, there is no need to look for evidence of this because it exists in the vocabulary. What Nehru was doing on the border with China he called the “forward policy” and the name alone is sufficient to reveal what it intended to achieve.
China may well be the treacherous and devious state we have been taught in our textbooks it is. I think it was Mao Zedong who said that when faced with an opponent, one should push till one meets resistance. And that could perhaps be what the Chinese are doing at the moment.
However, we should also know that China has no disputed land border with any of her neighbours, except India and our pal Bhutan. It has settled all other disputes. I am quite sure most Indians neither know this nor expected it to be the case. The problem of our curriculum is thought to be Hindutva’s revisionism. And it is. The other problem is that of wilful ignorance and victimhood.
Of course this is not limited to one subject. Look at our understanding of what is going on in Jammu and Kashmir. Photographs of jawans patrolling deserted streets in a city under curfew does not evoke the questions it should. We have internalised the idea that the problem is entirely one caused by miscreants who must be sorted out by force.
One way to engage China and any other foreign adversary is through the military. Hard power (arms, threats, actions) exists for a reason and it must be used when it needs to be. That is not in dispute and I am not questioning that at all. I am referring to the inflexibility that the government of India has on many issues because it has sold the population a fable it now finds difficult to walk back. This is true no matter which party is in power.
There are ways to disarm the anger that may be preventing us from acting rationally. The government seems to be doing this by directing media focus away from the problem so that it is not talked about. Another way to do this would be to simply be transparent and educate the population on the real history of our borders.