Get Me Right: May 2013

The News Republic of Baroda

HOW many local news channels can a medium sized city like Baroda have? Or should have? Four? Five? Nine? The city boasts of 23 registered television news organizations. To put it in perspective,

India

has only 14 national Hindi news channels. Add five of English, that’s still four short of Baroda’s tally!

That naturally takes one to the question: why is the culture capital of Gujarat that news hungry? Is it a reflection of city’s intellectual urges? Or is it something else. Its not intellect when the stellar list of owner-editors includes a former Omelet selling hawker, a plastics trader, a former student leader, and a bootlegger. My limited pursuit of this question unfortunately did not lead to a cogent explanation, except for, may be that it is an accident of circumstances.

If for a moment we assume everything to be above board, the business model is quite simple. Keep a camera team on the ground to cover events, mostly accidents and press conferences, turn the contents collected through the day into a half hour bulletin, burn a CD, and give it over to a cable operator to beam it into local homes. In reality, the camera team is actually a half educated boy who is given a cheap CCD video camera and a mike. This cheaply equipped reporter-cameraman is mostly cheaply paid as well. Paying the cable operator for the air time is the only other cost to be borne. Bingo, and you own a news organization!

Two are cheekily named – DNTV (a take on NDTV), and Times News Network (copying TOI’s TNN) – while another is simply called 7.30 as it gets aired in that slot in the evening. In case you thought some of it might be difficult, one is even named Easy. Except for three channels – VNM, TNN, and Easy – seen across the city, rest are actually Gali-Mohalla wonders seen in pockets where they have clout with the cable operator. Many actually are only on paper, giving fake prestige to the person registering it with administration. A sort of arrangement that helps them put PRESS in bold on their vehicles just to avoid a traffic cop’s chit.

My own experience during cub reporter days in Baroda was that lot of hanky-panky also goes on behind these organizations. Not to mention the embarrassment such paparazzi crowd can be at a press conference, bringing down overall level of journalistic discourse with their crassness and conduct. According to some owners who are genuinely in the business to provide a local news platform the scene turned bad when the cable networks decided to get into news for the leverage the PRESS tag would bring. Add a few rotten eggs and the scene went from bad to worse.

I am flagging the issue as it is connected with larger media scene in the country as well. While multiplicity is seen as guarantor of media’s independence – a countervailing force against domination of few points of view – this kind of hydra headed explosion too is not in the interest of both integrity and quality of the profession.

*Baroda’s channels: VNM, GVN, GNN, TNN, DNTV, KTV, GTV, B-TV, BRG News, Katar Sayaji, Times News Network, Tahelka, Raj Kavi, News Plus, Crime Point, Today News, 7.30 PM, Gujarat News, India Aaj, Katibandh, Easy TV, and Vadodara Mitra.

COINS-II

Health

ONGC 50

ILO diamond jubilee

UNO 50

Dandi March 75

Narayan Gurudev

Dadabhai Naoroji

Bhagwan Mahavira

Indian Council of Medical Research

Babu Rajendra Prasad

Millenia of Brihadeeshwar Temple, Tanjavur

Kautilya

C Subramaiam

Shaheed Bhagat Singh

Tagore

Shivaji

Netaji

Sardar

Relax, Let Miyan Nawaz Sort Himself Out First!

AS is its wont, Indian media – particularly the news television – is going bonkers over victory of Miyan Nawaz Sharif in

Pakistan

, with a commensurate starry eyed pitch for improved Indo-Pak relations. There is already clamour that the low hanging fruit of MFN status to

India

be served by Pakistan ASAP. The euphoria could be misplaced if we take all tenses – past, present and future – into account.

Let’s take history first. I have not been able to successfully google the famous half-hug that Sharif gave to Atal Bihari Vajpayee at Wagah, but the baggage he brings has been tweeted by former top IB hand and strategic analyst B Raman. It was under Sharif’s watch in 1993 that the Lashkar-e-Toiba infiltrated into Jammu and Kashmir. Fugitive don Dawood Ibrahim was given sanctuary in

Pakistan

following March 1993 Mumbai serial blasts the same time. And, it was Sharif government that became first in the world to recognize the Taliban regime in

Afghanistan

, and start doing business with them.

Now to the present: Sharif has come to power on the back of a heavy doze of Islamist rhetoric. In a sense his victory is manufactured given the fact that all secular parties by Pakistani standards – PPP, ANP, and MQM – were hounded out by the Pakistani Taliban out of the campaign itself. Their leaders in fact were forced to address rallies via mobile phones and video even as the Sharifs went street-by-street, circus Lions in toe. Much as the Indian establishment would hope that justice comes to Hafiz Saed and the likes of him, Miyan Nawaz is in gratitude of the same men. So our expectations could be misplaced.

That brings me to the future. Sharif would need to triangulate his dynamics with both the Mullahs and the Military afresh. With the former he would need to evolve a relationship in which his policies are not unduly influenced by the religious frenzy that presently engulfs

Pakistan

. It is going to be a long road for the new Prime Minister to disengage from this embrace which has strong foreign policy consequences in both

Afghanistan

and

India

, particularly post American withdrawal in 2014.

So far as the latter is concerned the relationship begins with a level of mistrust given the Kargil backdrop. Thus it might be longer still before a working relationship with Rawalpindi develops, unhinged from recent history. His comment of inquiry into Kargil episode might just prove to be good sound byte for Indian television. It would be easier said than done given that there is no proof that Pak Army has become any less touchy, even in post-Musharraf era, over the issue of civilian control. Ayub protege Z A Bhutto had famously promoted Zia over four generals, as had Zia protege Sharif in case of Musharraf. Yet, we know the history.

Thus, India

should wait to see durability of Pakistani transition. After all a change of government is essentially an internal affair of a country and we should let Sharif sort himself out over the next six months, or even a year. Meanwhile, for our strategic and intelligence community, the biggest take away from the just concluded democratic exercise in

Pakistan

should be Baluchistan. The overall turnout was less than 20 per cent against Pak average of sixty. Average winners have bagged over 100,000 votes in Punjab, 50,000 in Sindh, and a measly 10,000 in Baluchistan. So as they would say in Punjabi: Thaand Rakh Yaar (take it easy), as also a hawk’s eye on Baluchistan.

Foreign Policy No Mushaira. Bunk Gujral Doctrine

A 2001 novel by then BBC Asia correspondent Humphery Hawksley pictured third world war engendered by a covert Indian army operation deep inside

Tibet

China

retaliates with its full might, and even for fiction, results are not difficult to guess. I would review the book sometime later. But, here we have a reverse scenario. A deep incision by the Chinese inside Indian territory, and forget war or world war, we talked of pimples, acne, and clearsil! On the western front

Pakistan

has delivered an Indian spy in body bag for not having a strong enough case to eliminate him judicially.

Sri Lanka

is routinely lifting Indian fishermen around Adam’s bridge, and

Maldives

just cocked a snook by jailing its

India

backed president. And all smaller SAARC countries play the

China

card rather up our nose. Theek hai? The crux is that

India

suffers from a Gulliverian image crisis in the neighbourhood. Why?

After the 1962 debacle the intelligence community had realized the importance of the capacity to keep tabs on (and to occasionally finger) the neighbourhood. Thus was born the Special Frontier Force – Establishment 22 in common parlance. The benefits became visible soon in the form of Chittagong (1971) and Siachen (1986) operations that have given India everlasting strategic depth and strength. Then came Inder Kumar Gujral on the foreign policy horizon in mid-1990s and all the good, hard nosed choices made by

India

came undone.

Gujral’s Faiz poetry influenced mind brought a doctrine the ill effects of which are now becoming starkly visible. The Gujral doctrine, with its premise that India with its intimidating size could be avuncular to its smaller neighbours with unilateral concessions, was per se not wrong. But the problem lay in the way it was interpreted by those it was meant for. With the exception of Bhutan, everyone has cocked a snook at us. Gujral put stifling restrictions on covert operations by RAW and IB in the neighbourhood and reduced the Establishment-22 into an uncertain existence. His successor, another poet Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, continued with sham covert ops and gave it in writing that Tibet was an integral part of the Chinese republic. Just makes it clear that foreign policy is best left to minds that only understand prose.

A Mexican dictator once famously lamented, “So far from God, so near to the United States,” – such is the impression of their big neighbour. It is a view in Lat-Am that USA is like a big dog in a small room. Even if it wags its tail in love, it knocks down a chair or two. China is attaining similar proportions in its neighbourhood. That seems like a legitimate target for India: not to be an indulgent uncle of the neighbourhood but to be a no nonsense keeper of calm.

In another context, on the eve of India’s 1998 nuclear tests George Fernandez branded China, not Pakistan, as India’s enemy no. 1. Another Lohiaite Mulayam Singh Yadav has recently shown the sense to repeat the charge. Let us have an eternal clarity on this – it is China we need to focus on.

Pakistan

and the rest would be taken care off from that capacity building. After the DBO fiasco the strategic community would hopefully chart out a course with clear cut goals. But in the short term,

India

needs to immediately roll back the Gujral doctrine and start all covert operations. More specifically, recharge the Establishment-22. In the longer term we need to bury it for ever, for, foreign policy is no Kavi Sammelan, even with smaller neighbours as we have realized.