Government, Prasar Bharti chief and media brand editor ‘anti-India’

Governments of the United Kingdom and Canada jointly organised a global conference on media freedom in London on July 10 and 11. According to reports, a presentation by a prominent magazine editor from India triggered a furious rebuttal from the Prasar Bharti chairman A. Surya Prakash, who was accompanied by BJP MP Swapan Dasgupta and pro-BJP commentator Kanchan Gupta.

The executive editor of Caravan magazine, Dr Vinod Jose, reveals that the ugly incident was given a distorted and one-sided coverage in India, even by the public broadcaster. This prompted him to put down on record the incident in London and the systematic hounding of dissenters in India in a letter to the organisers of the global meet.

On Wednesday Jose recalled the details in a series of tweets and said : “You show brutal lynching videos to a global audience + show how hatred is systemically cultivated by the Hindu right + show how Indian news media suffers from lack of diversity = RSS thinktank advisor alias public broadcast chief brand you “anti-India”.

Edited excerpts from the letter to the organisers in London:

The Global Conference for Media Freedom in London last week was truly one of a kind, and immensely important at the present juncture for so many of the world’s countries. I cannot state the societal value of a bold, free and principled media any better than the organisers of the conference did in their invitation to me as a speaker:

“It [media freedom] is an essential component of economic prosperity, social development and resilient democracies. It is a right to which all governments have committed as enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

On the second day of the conference, as part of a panel on “Religion and the Media: Telling the Untold Story,” I spoke gladly and frankly about major impediments to the freedoms of thought, speech and belief in India today. …

Irony of ironies, my act of speaking truly and freely at a conference on media freedom was met, at the conference itself, by an attempt to discredit and intimidate me by representatives of the Indian government.

The attempt was clumsy and ineffective, and the matter should have been forgotten there, except that the Indian government officials chose to pursue it further on home soil.

Even then, the government official’s conduct in my case is hardly the most egregious attack on free expression in the country—as was made clear by my presentation at the conference, which focused on a rise in lynchings and targeted killings. But since it stems from an incident at the conference that you organised, I feel I should inform you of what has happened, as an example of how dissent is received and treated in India.

More importantly, I wish to highlight that this is but a minor instance of an alarming trend: India’s government, as well as the parent organisation of the country’s Hindu-nationalist ruling party, is straining to brand prominent dissenters as public enemies, as a means of legitimising their harassment and even possible violence against them.

While telling the India story at the conference, I started by playing some video clips of lynchings in progress, shot on cell phones by members of the lynch mobs themselves. The latest of these came from just a few weeks ago, when a mob lynched a young Muslim man in the central Indian state of Jharkhand.

From there, I went from incident to incident in reverse chronology from 2016 to 1984: four Dalit men whipped with their hands tied to a jeep; the targeted killings of Christians in Kandhamal (nearly a hundred Christians killed); the burning to death, with his two young sons, of the Australian missionary Graham Staines, who had run a leprosy home for over three decades; the anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat (nearly 2,000 Muslims killed); anti-Sikh violence in Delhi (nearly 2,700 Sikhs killed)…

To show the deep historical roots of this hatred, I presented the glowing views on Fascism and Nazism of VD Savarkar and MS Golwalkar. Savarkar and Golwalkar are considered founding fathers of Hindutva—the guiding ideology of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which today is the mothership for a long list of affiliated Hindutva organisation, including the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

With that done, I talked about how, with the rise of the Hindu right, there is increasingly little investigative or critical work in India’s mainstream press on the ideological and organisational powers behind the attacks on religious minorities and oppressed castes. I concluded by saying that the severe underrepresentation of these very groups in Indian newsrooms is one of the reasons for this state of affairs. (Members from the top 10-15 percent of the superior castes occupy 85 percent of India’s media jobs, whereas the rest of the population gets only 15 percent of the jobs in media.)

As soon as my presentation was done, Surya Prakash, the chairman of India’s national broadcasting corporation, Prasar Bharati, spoke up from the last row of the hall. He said he was accompanied by a parliamentarian and an eminent journalist. “All of us take strong exception to this presentation on India,” he said.

“India is the largest democracy in the world, and the most vibrant democracy in the world.” Mr Prakash accused me of portraying India in a bad light, and added that some people are using forums like this to push their own political agenda. He also said there were factual inaccuracies in my presentation, but did not point out a single one.

After seeing Mr Prakash’s outburst, the conference organisers insisted on providing me with security for the duration of my stay in London.

A senior UN official told me that such conduct at an international forum by the chairman of India’s public broadcast corporation was a practical demonstration of the growing intolerance and hatred I had highlighted. He told me that if I needed asylum, I should not hesitate to ask. …

Mr Prakash failed to disclose while introducing himself that he is a senior advisor to the Vivekananda International Foundation, a think tank affiliated to the RSS.

His companions were Kanchan Gupta and Swapan Dasgupta. Mr Prakash also failed to say that Gupta is a BJP loyalist, who stepped away from journalism at the turn of the millennium to serve as speechwriter to the first BJP prime minister. Dasgupta, a fellow traveler of the BJP, was nominated to the upper house of parliament after the current BJP government took power.

I assumed that the matter was laid to rest. But when I arrived back in India on Saturday, I learnt that there had been vicious and distorted reports against me in the national media, which simultaneously served as PR plugs for Mr Prakash.

A local news service had issued a report titled “Prasar Bharati chief slams Indian magazine editor for ‘blatant’ anti-India presentation at global meet.” This was published in the Indian Express, The Hindu, Deccan Herald, The Tribune and Outlook—all prominent national publications—as well as many regional-language newspapers.

The report falsely claimed that I had said that the RSS was behind the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984; what I had actually said in London, with a firm grounding in fact, was that members of the Congress party and also members of the RSS played their roles in the killings of Sikhs.

The writers of the report did not bother to contact me for comment, or even to check their version of events against publicly available recordings of the event in London. The state-owned news broadcaster, which Mr Prakash himself heads, aired a two-episode programme in the same vein attacking what I highlighted in London.

I was not overly concerned with these efforts, though I was disappointed by the lack of journalistic rigour and fairness shown by the organisations involved, and made this clear in letters to them. What gave me greater pause was the news that, while I was in London, the civil-rights activists Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey sent around a note about their discovery that they had been listed as “urban Naxals”—a term synonymous with “anti-Indian” and “anti-national” in the Hindu nationalist vocabulary—in a booklet circulated by RSS affiliates, and launched last year by the top leader of the organisation.

Roy and Dey are tireless campaigners for government transparency and accountability, and Roy has been honoured with the Ramon Magsaysay Award. As they wrote, the booklet has sweeping derogatory references to activists, journalists, educationists, and a whole gamut of people who have contributed to and continue to raise their voice for justice. … the booklet has sought to include within its warped definition of nationalism and anti-nationals, anything and anyone who might create platforms for questioning authority, arbitrariness and corruption. … This booklet which is deliberately inaccurate and incorrect in most part, uses the typical language and mix of fact with slanderous images and labels created to misinform people.

To add to the concern, also while I was at the conference, the government conducted raids on the offices and home of the prominent feminist and human-rights lawyer Indira Jaising. This was all part of a larger emerging pattern.

I echo a line from the literature of the London conference: “We must work together to stop the alarming increase in attacks. No journalist should fear for their life because of their job.”

Sadly, for too many in India, that fear is all too real. …