Fear and loathing

There are two nuggets of information that need to be provided at the outset. The first, I have never been on any presidential, prime ministerial or ministerial visit in my career and am currently not a contender for future junkets. The second is a slightly longer story.

Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad, though almost twin cities are separated by a fair distance. Mainly ministers and babudom have their dwellings in Gandhinagar. Barring a handful of journalists who’ve been allotted government accommodation in Gandhinagar, most scribes have lived in Ahmedabad with reporters on the government, Legislative Assembly and political beats doing the daily commute and returning to their office in the evenings to file stories. To assist them in their job, Keshubhai Patel, when he was chief minister, directed officers in the information department to run a daily bus service from Ahmedabad to Gandhinagar and back.

The bus would leave every morning and be back after offices closed to enable reporters to spend the whole day in the proverbial corridors of power. Among the decisions which were taken by the government soon after Narendra Modi became Chief Minister in October 2001, was to scale down the bus service from a daily one to a weekly service that continues to plough even now — every Wednesday when the scheduled Cabinet meeting is held. Clearly the message in the post-Modi era of Gujarat was that journalists need be facilitated to report only official briefings and not snoop around through the day in government offices.

Given this background, it is of no surprise that during his visit to Bhutan and also for the trip to Brazil for the Brics Summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to whittle down the media entourage accompanying him.

He took only a handful of journalists from Indian wire agencies, government-owned media and a camera team from ANI, the private company contracted to provide footage for the website www.narendramodi.in and other news channels during Mr Modi’s electoral campaign.

Indian wire agencies, more than foreign news agencies, limit their reporting to a narrow arc of actual events and statements. They are not expected to be venturous and write what scribes call “interpretative copy” that in common parlance means making common sense of terse diplomatic statements and phrases. Newspaper and magazine reporters — or TV reporters — have a wider brief and read meaning into words. Barring a few TV channels and newspapers, no one has sent reporters on their own and chose to make do with news agencies and wire services.

There is no gainsaying that the absence of journalists on various foreign trips of Mr Modi will provide Indians with a sanitised version of developments.

Central to the issue is the role Mr Modi visualises for the media in the country. His impression of the media is greatly a result of a predominantly hostile relationship in the 13 years he spent as Gujarat Chief Minister.

The bulk of these years were spent trading charges and counter charges with significant sections of the media that continued to look at Mr Modi through the prism of 2002 riots.

In response, Mr Modi accused the media of playing into the hands of opponents. Even during his election campaign, in his speeches, he repeatedly pilloried the media. Anyone who did not endorse every assertion and each action of his, was branded an agent of the enemy. During the campaign of 2014, Mr Modi used the media as a carrier of his views. Barring an interview or two on TV, the streets on which Mr Modi reached out to journalists were essentially one-way avenues where cross-questioning was disallowed. That Mr Modi views the job of the media as little beyond publicists is evident in his promotion of social media and repeated assertions that with its advent the necessity to interact with journalists has become redundant.

Journalists, in his mind, are essentially baton carriers of statements and events which can be disclosed. That is why he advised party leaders and ministerial colleagues not to address the nation through the media and instead use Twitter and Facebook.

In a vibrant democracy, the Fourth Estate has a vital role to play. It is designed to be the watchdog of society, politics and government functioning. Any attempt to muzzle the press is the first sign of suppression of dissent.

Every now and then, even in vibrant democracies, political leaders have often come along who find the presence of the media a tad intrusive. They have chosen different ways to deal with it in the past — most famously by Indira Gandhi during Emergency with press censorship and Rajiv Gandhi with the aborted Defamation Bill.

Mr Modi has also said that his scant regard for the media — even that section which looks at him with a magnifying glass and not necessarily critically — stems from the vilification campaign conducted against him by the media. As Chief Minister, Mr Modi displayed reservations at attempts of the judiciary to pro-actively recast itself. He also made a mockery of the Cabinet system of decision making by entrusting unprecedented powers in the hands of chosen bureaucrats who functioned with his authority bypassing ministers who remained mere rubber stamps.

Mr Modi entered the portals of the highest powers of India by calling Parliament a temple of democracy. But in that temple, the media also must be an idol, albeit one of the minor ones, on the porticoes of the temple if not in the sanctum sanctorum.

Some years ago, an Indian newspaper published a revealing interview of the then chief of Xinhua, China’s official multimedia news agency. Asked about its independence, he replied that the agency believed in reporting “with social responsibility. There are different concepts of democracy; you cannot apply the same policy in different countries.”

In the barely 50 days of the Modi premiership, some papers have begun distinguishing themselves by moving from publishing “critical analysis” to carrying only “appreciative commentary”.

A majority in Parliament should make Prime Ministers surer of themselves. A sign of a confident leader is the alacrity with which she or he accepts scrutiny even though they may glare at criticism. Any leader who attempts to create a system where a veil is drawn between government functioning and the media indicates the existence of a fragile and insecure core.

It is one thing to consider nations like China and Singapore as economic role models, but relegating media to the periphery would be unfortunate and will ultimately backfire because of the tradition of a vibrant media in India.

Social media may be a fashion tool for Mr Modi’s government, but soon Indians will want their daily dose of bitter, and may be better, news and views.