MJ Akbar
MEDIA has become middle class. This might have been funny were its consequences not EDIA has become mid-MUDRA so smug. Print still retains an upper middle-class sense of itself but it is still some ladders below the khadinationalism aristocracy that was its high plateau.
Dates are always going to be challenged, and my suggestion will certainly be contested, but if one had to select the moment when the process became lodged in media consciousness then it would be from the time Madan Mohan Malaviya bought the paper and GD Birla found a way to sustain it financially and grow its circulation without compromising on nationalist credentials. This does not take anything away from its seminal inception during the historic Akali reform movement, and the great role played by its editor KM Panikkar.
Appropriately Mahatma Gandhi performed the opening ceremony of its rebirth on September 26, 1924. Panikkar and Devdas Gandhi not only challenged the British but also the colonial media aristocracy headed by the imperial Statesman in Calcutta and Bennett & Coleman’s Times of India in Mumbai.
Media nobility
The great quality shared by any aristocracy, whatever its allegiance, is an ability to view its class-and-cash netherlands occasionally with a touch of arrogance but never with contempt. Contempt is crass, not class. This media nobility was well-read. For decades after independence, it could legitimately claim to be an – an, not the – academic wing of public policy. Think Sham Lal or Girilal Jain or Dileep Padgaonkar of the Times of India; a robust communicator like Frank Moraes of the Indian Express; or a mind of many parts like Sardar Khushwant Singh. In Calcutta, Evan Charlton, Pran Chopra, Surendra Nihal Singh. Their salaries might have been upper middle-class; their intellect was noble.
Sham Lal might have considered it infra dig to leave his intellectual den but he, his immediate successors and leaders like Frank Moraes believed that it was their duty to check streetreality and tell the Government, in polite but unmistakable language that the cops were on the take or the traffic lights were defunct. They sent, possibly at arm’s length and through their chief reporters, typewriter commandos into the rural hinterland, for their realm of reportage was the world of India, not just the preening urban Englishwallah sliver which constituted its readership.
They were confident intellectuals, quite content in the tiny cubicles which the Times of India provided for their professional habitat. It was a prison cell, not an office; but since they were media monks, it did not matter. Their egos were devoted to higher concerns.
The Statesman’s office contours were a little grander, but the self-confidence was equivalent. Editorials used to thunder because editorials used to be read. Advertising always had its place, as it always must; but advertising was not treated as content.
The trouble with contemporary middle-class mentality is that it is so transfixed with upward mobility that it looks down only in the pejorative sense. The high point is indifference, the low point contempt. There is so much judgementalism that a Supreme Court might feel jittery. These media magistrates are too busy with their proclaimed audience numbers to waste any time on reflective evidence before they condemn the poor for their poverty: implicitly when not explicitly.
Since the underprivileged are not part of the consumer base which brings in advertising, it does not deserve to be in the news. Their entry into the news bulletin can only be through sensation. Die in an earthquake and they will rush the cameras. Murder is good; mass murder, better. There is no reportage. There is always a hunt. Hunger is never news, because the pictures disturb an environment conducive to revenue.
What greater evidence can we possibly have for this phenomenon than the startling media indifference to the 10th anniversary of one of the great events of the 21st century – MUDRA, or the rather laborious Micro Units Development & Refinance Agency? I would go further. In conjunction with the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana, this massive Government effort to eliminate the curse of India, hunger, must constitute one of the historic achievements of modern India. When the history – history, not biography – of Narendra Modi’s tenure as Prime Minister is written, this must be rated as his greatest contribution to his country.
