Reflections on Mandeep Punia’s arrest and bail and relations between Police and the Press

My old editor, Edatata Narayanan's laconic voice still rings in my ears. “I want the Patriot's reporter in Police Headquarters, not the Police reporter in my headquarters".

That clearly drew the line for us all. It also set us apart from a few contemporaries known for their proximity to the police, so close a relationship that there were unkind puns on their names, and fake news (I wish) that their cars had petrol filled up for free at the Tis Hazari - Rajpur road police petrol pump.

Ed also taught us that the police are never "forced" to fire on protesters. The police fire on protestors, or teargas them, or use lathi-charge and water cannons; and in some dark future, they may even use cattle prods imported from America, Israel or Saudi Arabia to control people demanding their rights or opposing some asinine policies imposed by self-serving politicians.

But of course, that was the age of reporters who wielded a pocket notebook and pen, and perhaps lugged a "portable" two-kilogramme tape-recorder on their shoulders long before the smartphone became eyes, ears and writing finger; and which made a reporter out of every bystander with the same felicity with which it turns an ideologue or religious fanatic into a multiplier of hate.

But in times then, and in times now, it was clear that the reporter was an observer and documenter. He was not the story, even an exclusive story. The time a reporter made news was when he or she was shot by someone exposed by the news coverage, or when one died while with a military mountaineering expedition or killed in a VVIP motorcade that met with an accident. The time newsmen were arrested for being newsmen was during the Emergency. And the time newspaper magnates were arrested was when they were caught trading in rigidly controlled newsprint, or such like. National Herald's Jawaharlal Nehru was in jail frequently for his political activity.

It made ethical sense therefore to not report police action while being protected by the police, or in fact riding the police Water cannon truck. It makes for a great vantage point and some hair-raising video footage, but it is like a body camera worn by a butcher. How can a reporter write about a tear gas barrage unless she or he has been brought to tears by the acrid fumes? You don’t have to inhale them till you die. But to report it from a kilometer away is not being very professional. Might as well write while watching TV.

That is the moral dilemma of every professional reporter, reporting what is erroneously called "action', or the milder "developments'' while being either neutral or siding with the more just cause. Ten times out of eleven, the people's cause is the more just. Often people are the victims in the dispute. Religion is no bar. Hindus in the Valley when Jagmohan was Governor, and Muslims since then there. Or the tribal Christians in Kandhamal.

The Americans in WWII, and then in Vietnam and Iraq, reduced journalism to embedded media, making war into a spectacle or a PR exercise. The few times the American reporter was singularly objective was while reporting Africa. I know because I was with them in a few places.

This has nothing to do really with that young activist video reporter and freelance journalist Mandeep Punia arrested for his coverage of the farmers' agitation, and specially exposing the complicity of the police and the media. He is now out on bail. He deserves the Indian version of the Pulitzer, if there is one.

I salute him.