Rohit Kumar 
New Delhi: The Press Club of India in New Delhi is hosting a literature festival and book fair. This first of its kind event from February 28 to March 2 is playing host to well-known publishers and distributors like Rajkamal Prakashan, National Book Trust and Leftword Books, and also to individual publishers like Paranjoy and others.
Like any other lit fest, this one, too, is featuring panel discussions, book launches, and author interviews.
The inaugural panel discussion, ‘The Challenges facing a Free Press Today’, saw veteran journalists talk about the increasingly difficult terrain journalists are having to negotiate.
Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, who has published 38 books over the course of his career and written/co-authored eight (many on the unholy influence of Indian oligarchs on India’s media and political landscape) underscored what he felt was the biggest problem Indian media is currently facing:
“In a country where Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani are controlling such a large section of the media, how do you expect journalists to write articles or investigate the working of Ambani’s and Adani’s organisations?”
Hartosh Singh Bal, editor of The Caravan, pointed out how the media needs to become much more egalitarian, dominated as it is, currently, by ‘upper’ caste Brahmins. Bal was unsparing in his critique of journalists who he said have not done enough to uphold the integrity of the profession:
“I don’t know how many people I have met who have said, ‘I don’t know what this government will do! I don’t know when we will be all jailed!’ Is that a joke? How many people around us in Delhi have been jailed? The only people I know who have been jailed are either Muslims or Marxists, because the RSS has an ideological problem with this set. Apart from that, where are the journalists who have done enough to be jailed? I don’t see too many of them. We have self-censored ourselves. We have stopped ourselves from standing up and writing with the courage even within the limits that (media) organisations allow us.”
He also talked how reportage about and from Kashmir has all but disappeared.
“A Kashmiri journalist reporting from Kashmir,” he said, “faces the kind of threats that would suit the strongest of totalitarian states. A critical piece today written by a Kashmiri journalist is almost an impossibility, but we must still find ways to report critically to report on the mess this government is making in the state, and counter its propaganda claims.”
Veteran Hindi journalist, Urmilesh, also lamenting the historical lack of diversity in newsrooms, pointed out how caste has always dominated the newsroom and how any attempts to fight it have invariably been met with resistance. A prime example of this, he recalled, was when the V.P. Singh government proposed implementing the Mandal Commission recommendations in 1990.
As a young journalist working with Navbharat Times, Urmilesh said he had contacted six newspaper editors at the time who had taken a strong anti-Mandal stance in their editorials to ask them which recommendation exactly they considered ‘anti-national’ and detrimental for Indian society. Four of them, it turned out, hadn’t even read the report, but were writing against it, nonetheless. Two said they hadn’t even received the report.
He also pointed out how “Skill India” that Narendra Modi has promoted with great fanfare was, in fact, a big part of the Mandal Commission report.
Ashutosh Bhardwaj, editor of The Wire Hindi, talked about how the YouTube model of Hindi ‘journalism’, so-called, has completely stifled the possibility of grassroots reporting, and all but ruined actual Hindi journalism.
“There are three broad categories of YouTubers in this space,” he said.
“First, those who daily lift some major story from India or abroad and then do a show on that. Second, those who go into a village and turn a real live person into a meme, and third, those who do long rambling interviews with a celebrity or famous person. Where is the actual grassroots reporting in Hindi? If we really want to strengthen democracy at the grassroots, we will have to go to the Hindi readers who have now become viewers, and turn them back into readers.”
But the most succinct bit of insight and advice perhaps came from Pragya Singh, formerly with Newsclick:
“An environment needs to be created or nurtured where the reporter wanting to publish her or his next story is actually able to do that. Multiple ideas are floating around about how journalism needs to protect democracy. But if we can just protect the next story which we think is worth publishing, then that in itself would be a great achievement!”
Rohit Kumar is an educator, author and independent journalist.