This article was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
It was just another day in the pitiable life of India’s corporate-owned Big Media. Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to a television anchor – not to be mistaken for a journalist – after filing his nomination and made an astounding claim. With tears on camera, as Rahul Gandhi had predicted a few weeks back, Modi denied that he ever called Indian Muslims ‘infiltrators’ and ‘those with more children’. He extended his claim further: “I am really shocked! Who told you that when there is talk of more children then only Muslims are thought of. Why are you being unfair to Muslims? This is also the situation with poor families in our country… I neither mentioned Muslim nor Hindu.”
“The day I do ‘Hindu-Muslim’“, he added, “I won’t be fit for public life.” As a journalist promptly observed, “He isn’t”. There are many who would agree, especially those who have observed him since he gained political prominence in the late 1990s, and particularly after he became the chief minister of Gujarat in 2002.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Modi has a “purana rishta” – an old relationship – with lies and untruths and that bears no repetition. Indian news television, or whatever passes off for it, is beyond redemption. It is rotting at the bottom of a bottomless pit. What needs to be underscored is the coverage in India’s English language newspapers. Two of them had Modi’s astonishing claim on their front page: The Times of India and the Indian Express. And both did perfect stenography. They simply narrated what Modi had said, without attempting even a semblance of a fact-check, the basic function of any journalist. ‘If I do Hindu-Muslim, won’t be fit for public life: PM Modi’, said the TOI headline and the story provided no context or background for readers to judge his claim. ‘The day I do Hindu-Muslim, I will be unworthy of public life… I will not do it, it’s my resolve: PM Modi,’ said the Express headline. Though its story reproduced quotes from his April 21 Banswara speech, it failed to point out the obvious: that the PM was making an obvious misrepresentation of his remarks.
Modi’s speech at Banswara is crystal clear in its words and language. It is not a dog whistle, it an open and loud howl for human consumption that is recorded on video. Given the undeniable nature of his remarks, Modi’s disingenuous claim did not merit a stenographic report. It needed to be reported as a fact check, so that readers and viewers could be armed with the necessary health warnings. [See here and here]. The India Cable is a newsletter so was even more direct: We told our readers yesterday that Modi had lied.
Even if newspapers chose for whatever reason to not cross swords with Modi on their news pages, stenographic headlines and reportage ought to have been avoided. Perhaps some newspapers will take note of Modi’s mendacity in their editorial columns tomorrow. Simple logic is all that it takes to point out the absurdity of his claim. If by his reference to those ‘having more children’ Modi really meant the ‘poor’ and not ‘Muslims’, then he was telling voters that the Congress party will give away wealth to the poor and that he will ‘never allow that to happen’. Essentially, Modi is then saying that he will stop any attempt to lift the poor out of their poverty. Yes, it is as absurd as it sounds. Only if these newspapers had pointed it out.
Finally, the Election Commission issued a notice to the BJP party president about Modi’s speech and after much delay, JP Nadda, the party president has replied to the charge, justifying the words used by Modi as “factual”. If Modi claims that he didn’t really say what he is accused of saying, then what is Nadda justifying? Why is he explaining to the Election Commission that Modi’s words against Muslims were justified? As The Wire notes, Nadda is justifying as ‘factual’ what Modi claims he never said about Indian Muslims in the first place.
The absurdity of the whole exercise is self-evident. “O, what a tangled web we weave/ When first we practise to deceive”. This applies as much to Modi as it does to Indian Big Media. They are perhaps following the formulation of an advisor to Modi’s Information and Broadcasting ministry: “The new-fangled notions of holding power to account; interrogating power; speaking truth to power, that is a language for activists [not journalists]”.What this official advocates is the path to good stenography. And as so many of our newspapers have shown today, this is nothing but the dying declaration of Indian journalism.
