Pamela Philipose 
How is this for a Freudian slip?
Earlier this week, in the wake of US prosecutors indicting Gautam Adani for bribing officials in India and misleading investors, a Congress spokesperson made a reference to “Adani ka dalal (Adani’s broker)” in a programme on the Hindi news channel, Aaj Tak.
The words got the anchor all riled up and she launched into a diatribe against him for calling the prime minister of India a “dalal”. The spokesperson corrected her: “But I did not even name the prime minister…”
It was a snapshot on how even while every mediaperson in the country knows well the real story of Indian politics, who the brokers truly are and whose interests they serve, nothing emerges in the stuff they dish out to the public. Their talent, their journalistic instinct, their reputation, their careers have all been harnessed to the singular aim of serving the interests of the power brokers whose narratives they are duty bound to further. Their names won’t figure in chargesheets, and neither will US prosecutors come after them of course, but by being embedded in the machinery that keeps Adani and his scams going they too have played a role, albeit a tangential one, in this sordid bribery saga. In fact, over time, they will work long and hard to wash the grime off the man until he emerges, freshly lathered and perfumed, as synonymous with India’s economic growth yet again. After all, did they not help him make an almost miraculous recovery after the mauling caused by the Hindenburg Research report and allow him to emerge the richest man in the country in two short years?
This lesser known entrepreneur from Gujarat arrived in the national capital in May 2014 in the shape of an aircraft bearing his name from which Narendra Modi, the prime minister designate, disembarked. As Narendra Modi tightened his grip on the levers of power, so too did Adani on airports, sea ports, mines, limitless stretches of primeval forest, energy behemoths – and government contracts. The Adani website, full of smiling faces, claims its vision is about “balancing growth with goodness.”
So dazzled was India’s Big Media by the spin that it forgot to report on the real story. Their coverage on Adani’s affairs has been marked by conspicuous obsequiousness, silence, amnesia, and tutoring. Add to this, industrial levels of disinformation. The claim, for instance, that Adani provides jobs is largely untrue. The extensive use of automation in Adani operations has resulted in an insignificant number of jobs generated (‘Rising automation slows down Adani’s demand for employees’, Financial Express, Sept 16, 2024).
Over the years, major opportunities for serious media investigation into the unstoppable growth of the Adani empire have been missed. How, for instance, when Narendra Modi was Gujarat chief minister did he come to acquire 6,456 hectares of land for his Mundra port and special economic zone at rates of Rs 1 to Rs 32 per square metre when other industrialists had to pay around Rs 900-1000 per square metre? We will never know because the media never cared to dig too deeply into this. Such transactions typically involved the ruling party marking uncultivated land as “unused”, although it was part of the commons that local communities have accessed for generations to graze their cattle and other purposes. When the local population came to know of the Mundra port/SEZ allotment that was conducted under a thick veil of opacity, they filed a PIL, and through this process were able to get back 108 hectares after a decade (‘108 Hectares of Land Allotted to Adani Ports to be Retrieved For Cattle Grazing: Gujarat Govt to HC’, The Wire, July 9, 2024).
But it was during Modi’s primeministership that the Adani graph rose to stratospheric heights. At a point when Big Media media’s gaze on a man, who was in lockstep with the political establishment, was absolutely essential, was precisely the moment when media cameras were turned off. It was reported only recently that around the time Modi came to power in 2014, the Adani Group ensured at least 24 shipments of low-quality coal were shipped in to Tamil Nadu and was later sold to the Tamil Nadu state power utility at three times the original cost (‘OCCRP report alleges huge scam in the supply of coal by Adani’, May 23, The Hindu).
Over-invoicing became something of a modus operandi for the group. In 2016, India’s Directorate of Revenue Intelligence flagged “artificial inflating” to the tune of 50 to 100 per cent of coal imports by five Adani companies. The attempts made by Indian journalists to understand the state of play only brought personal reversals to the few intrepid ones. That year, the Economic and Political Weekly carried two important stories on the over-invoicing of power plant equipment and the over-invoicing of imported coal by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta. It should have drawn others to take these investigations further, but it was Thakurta who ended up without a job.
The international media, however, did not take their eyes off the ball. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, given the multi-billion dollar projects in Down Under encompassing coal mining, solar energy and a port terminal, has been particularly persistent. It came up with a comprehensive documentary in 2017 on the financial scams and environmental rampages of the group. Newslaundry raised an important question at that juncture: ‘Why did the Indian media give a miss to the damning Australian documentary on Adani Group?’(October 5, 2017). The question was never answered.
In 2023, the Financial Times, London, carried a damning story, ‘The mystery of the Adani coal imports that quietly doubled in value’ (October 11, 2023) on how the Adani Group “appears to have imported billions of dollars of coal at prices well above market value, according to customs records reviewed by the Financial Times.” The newspaper went on to confirm that there have been “longstanding allegations that Adani, the country’s largest private coal importer, has been inflating fuel costs and led millions of Indian consumers and businesses to overpay for electricity.” Despite the serious implications this had for Indian citizens few Indian newspapers followed up on it. The Hindu at least bothered to do an explainer on the FT story, ‘Explained |The allegations on Adani coal imports’ (October 26, 2023).
The list of egregious practices is long and international in scale. The group has shown no scruples in doing deals with dirty governments, whether it was the junta-ruled Myanmar or the genocidal state of Israel. Elbit drones, manufactured by Adani in India for Israel, is today contributing to raining death on hundreds of thousands of helpless Palestinians.
But among the most unconscionable silences by big media is the capture and stripping down of forests and pasture lands in India. It’s unconscionable because it is happening right under their eyes. Far from amplifying the voices of the distressed and dispossessed, Big Media has chosen to look the other way. Recently the Indian Express did carry a piece on destruction the Hasdeo forest, the largest stretch of unfragmented forests in central India (‘What is the Hasdeo Arand mining issue, and why villagers clashed with the police?’). But this was done long after large stretches of this once verdant area had already been reduced to resemble a moonscape shorn entirely of its trees. At least two years earlier, The Guardian, had reported that since the forest contains an estimated 5 billion tonnes of easy-to-mine coal, it has attracted this plunder. The Adani Group, not surprisingly, benefitted the most from the government’s decision to make the forest land available for coal mining (‘It was a set-up, we were fooled’: the coal mine that ate an Indian village’, December 20, 2022).
There will come a time when this snatch-and-encash empire will stand revealed before the eyes of the world. The Hindenburg Report of January 2023 and the recent move by a US court to indict Adani for bribery are just tips of the iceberg. But India’s Big Media must know that when this happens, they too will stand exposed for their strategic silences and tacit support and the media treatment accorded to the corporate group could becomes the perfect index to measure media independence in India or its lack thereof.
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Unpacking a vile video circulated during the Jharkhand poll
The BJP in election mode is a well-oiled hate machine. The recent electioneering that saw new declines in hate speech and included that cameo from a neighbourhood in the Meerapur assembly seat, Uttar Pradesh, which had an SHO brandish a revolver to dissuade Muslim women voters from casting their votes.
Something of a favourite media mode of the party’s IT Cell is the short video which can be deployed on various platforms, both online and offline. During the general election earlier this year there was one that had claimed that “Ancient India was really beautiful. We were so rich and prosperous that each and every citizen had plenty of gold…It was precisely because of our prosperity that invaders…used to come again and again to loot all our treasures…The Congress Party has been empowering people who belong to the very same community” (‘Animated BJP Video Targeting Indian Muslims Goes Off Instagram’, The Wire, May 1).
After an outcry from the Opposition, the ECI finally ordered it to be taken down. But this has not dissuaded the party in the least. During the recent Jharkhand election, another offensive video based on the same script emerged again. The setting this time was modern: a perfect family, sitting down in a perfect house to eat a perfect breakfast when the doorbell rings and hordes of men, women and children, all discernibly Muslim (remember the Modi jibe during the 2019 Jharkhand election campaign that you can make out this community from the clothes they wear), who then proceed to invade the perfect house.
The viewer is presented with two contending frames. A mainstream Hindu family with the mandated two children and a grandmother, is pitted against a large, raucous, rapacious Muslim one (“Hum do, hamare do, woh panch, unke pachees”), who then proceed to track mud into the perfect home, jump on the perfect beds with muddy feet, comb raw cotton on the perfect floor (to earn a living presumably), proceed to have a bath, even as the distressed head of the Hindu family protests at the “invasion”, while the others hold their noses.
What needs to be noted is the combination of illiteracy and blind prejudice that undergird this criminally defamatory script. Yet it ends up unintentionally, almost comically, reinforcing the point made in the Justice Sachar Committee Report (2006), that a large proportion of Muslims in India has been reduced to living in impoverished conditions and that it was high time that an Equal Opportunity Commission is set up to look into the deprivations the community faced in the country.
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Israel’s football hooligans and “anti-Semitism” charges
As Israel Defence Force (IDF) continues to raze Gaza to the ground, killing at last count over 44,000 Palestinians in what is one of history’s worst assaults on an entire people, that country’s propaganda wing feeds off the back story of the persecution Jews; frames its flattening out of Gaza as “self-defence”, and projects any attempt to critique Israel’s on-going genocide as an exercise in anti-Semitism.
We witnessed yet another instance of such doublespeak in the supposed “Amsterdam pogrom”. On November 6 and 7, an army of Israeli football hooligans (some of them army reservists) rooting for its team Maccabi Tel Aviv before a match with a Dutch football club, went berserk in downtown Amsterdam, confronting anti-genocide protestors, tearing down Palestinian flags flown in solidarity with Gaza, and attacking local residents. They shouted out the most abominable anti-Arab, anti-Palestine slogans.
“There are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left.”
“Let the IDF win, and f*** the Arabs!”
“F*** you terrorists, Sinwar die, everybody die.”
As one onlooker put it, “They punch you in the face and cry victim when you defend yourself.”
But the tactic worked. Before long the western media was accusing the Palestinian protestors of “Jew hunting” and “anti-Semitism”.
As Amsterdam resident Niamh Ni Bhriain observed in an article in Al Jazeera, ‘The pogrom that wasn’t’, “A wave of disinformation unleashed from Israel was replicated unchecked by Western media and the usual cohort of Western leaders, each outdoing the other at expressing the most outrage.”
Attempts were even made to compare what was happening to Kristallnacht, the Nazi putsch that took place in 1923.
Fortunately, thanks to the strong pushback from pro-Palestine voices, media footage and the careful unpacking of the chain of events by independent commentators, the fake narrative was exposed for the fraud it was.
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Readers write in…
Wrong to claim that Kennedy, Churchill are fallen idols
Aziz Ansari has this to say: “I have read with interest the following historical opinion piece, ‘When the Mighty Fall From Grace’ (Oct 31). There are some comments in it that I object to seriously. Let us take the section on Kennedy. He was well known for his philandering, but to talk of him as a “meretricious hoax” is certainly not correct. History accords him a greatness well above the normal for his handling of the Cuban missile crisis; his handling of the American steel price increase; and in handling the affairs of post-war Berlin.
“The second point is the authorship of his book, Profiles in Courage. There has never been any doubt about its authorship. Ted Sorenson may have been his “ghost writer” and speech writer, but JFK authored this book during his back illness. Sorenson, incidentally, never claimed authorship for the book. The Wire story should not have implied that JFK was not the author.
“As for Churchill, he was a racist and all that. One can read Churchill by Roy Jenkins to find enough dirt on him. But to say that his most famous speeches broadcast of June 4, 1940 (‘We shall fight on the beaches…’); of 18 June that same year (‘This was their finest hour…’) and of May 13, 1940 ‘Blood, Toil, and Tears …’ oration were not delivered by him and that an actor impersonated him because Churchill himself was too drunk to deliver them himself, is to carry things too far. The last speech was made in the House of Commons and one can hardly speak before such a body in an inebriated state. One can opine that Churchill was a scoundrel, etc, but his patriotism to UK and his work cannot be belittled. He drank brandy mostly but frankly I have never heard that he was ever drunk. He worked round the clock during the war and that is also recorded. I am no fan of Churchill except to say that some of our politicians are not half as patriotic as he was.
“Finally, JFK and Churchill are not fallen idols by any means. They never committed any felony, lied to public, cheated or had unethical financial dealings. Yes, they were flawed individuals but not ‘fallen’ idols. I expected better from the authors and, above all, from the Wire’s editorial staff. It raises the question: should I take all the opinion pieces in the Wire at face value?”
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Want to know more about the Havana Syndrome?
Anil Joshi offers an interesting subject for The Wire:
“The Havana Syndrome dates back to the second half of 2016. Since then it had been in news and Biden signed the Havana Act into law in 2021. The Havana Syndrome continues to remain enigmatic (‘US Orders Probe After CIA Staffer Reports Havana Syndrome Symptoms on Recent India Trip’, Sept 21, 2021). Why not demystify it? An article in The Wire.in or a video programme by the esteemed Karan Thapar will do great justice to such a theme. In this regard I can help by providing some background on the Havana Syndrome.”
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End note: I recently posted a tweet: “Very interesting. Turncoat Kailash Gahlot left the Aam Aadmi Party and joined the BJP overnight. Now he says he left AAP because it has ‘moved away from core values’. India wants to know what ‘core values’ did he find in his new party?”
To this I received a response from someone who used the pseudonym ‘plumpernickel’: “It’s not ‘Core Values’ Pamela, it’s ‘Crore Values’!!!”
Full marks for wit and wisdom to plumpernickel, whoever she or he may be!
Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in.