“I Cannot Live With The Idea Of Modi And Me In The Same Frame”: Akshaya Mukul Boycotts The Ramnath Goenka Awards by SANDEEP BHUSHAN
NB: Akshaya Mukul deserves our respect for standing up in defence of democratic values and a free press. And thanks are due to Sandeep Bhushan for reporting this protest. Indian journalists have a big role to play in resisting totalitarian politics, and all attempts to intimidate them must be exposed and condemned - DS
On 2 November 2016, as
Prime Minister Narendra Modi presides over the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in
Journalism Awards - instituted by the Indian Express in honour
of its founder—at least one recipient is conspicuous by his absence. Akshaya
Mukul, a senior journalist from the Times of India, has
boycotted the ceremony. Instead, Krishan Chopra, the publisher and chief editor
at HarperCollins India, the publishers of his book, Gita Press and the
Making of Hindu India, received the award on his behalf.
Mukul, a veteran who
has worked as a reporter for close to 20 years, has been conferred the RNG
award in the category of Books (non-fiction) for this book, which sheds light
on the ideological moorings of Hindutva - ironically, the lynchpin of the prime
minister’s politics. Since its release in August 2015, Gita Press and
the Making of Hindu India has elicited rave reviews and won literary
awards such as the Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year Award, and the Atta
Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize for the best non-fiction work
in English.
Mukul had no bone to
pick with the RNG awards. He told me that it was an “honour” to have won one.
His problem lay in receiving the award from the prime minister. “I cannot live
with the idea of Modi and me in the same frame, smiling at the camera even as
he hands over the award to me,” Mukul said. He invoked an incident that had taken place at Patiala House Court in
February, during which a number of journalists and students were assaulted by a
group of men in lawyer’s robes. The attackers were accompanied by the Bharatiya
Janata Party’s OP Sharma. Noting that the episode had led to unprecedented
protests by media persons, Mukul said, “Imagine, there were journalists who
defended the BJP and opposed us.”
The management’s
decision to invite Modi to the ceremony has reportedly irked some of the senior
editors of the Indian Express as well. A
journalist from the publication told me that these editors have raised
questions over whether “journalism awards should be given by the prime minister
at all, especially somebody as polarising as Modi.” When I asked Raj Kamal Jha,
the chief editor of the paper, about the matter, he responded with a cryptic
text message that appeared to disassociate the editorial department from the
invitation that was extended to Modi: “Please send your query to Vaidehi Thakar
of The Ramnath Goenka Foundation, which administers the award.”
Subsequently, I
sent a mail to Thakar, specifically asking her to explain the rationale behind
inviting Modi, who, I wrote, has a consistent anti-media policy and uses every
forum to run down the media. Thakar side-stepped my question. Instead, she
reassured me that the Indian Express would always remain “free
and fair.” “Your query,” she continued, “seems to suggest that the prime
minister’s presence might have some bearing on the Indian Express’s
coverage of the government or its politics. Such is not and will never be the
case.”
Thakar’s response also
included a long list of the politicians who have previously graced the award
ceremony, starting with Manmohan Singh, the former prime minister of India, in
2006. But India under Modi
is very different from India under Singh. For one, the BJP, led by Modi and
Amit Shah, has been unsparing in its response to the steadily dwindling section
of the media that dares to report facts over government spin. In August 2016,
for instance, the Indian Express published a story in which two of its senior
journalists reported that during a closed-door meeting in Delhi, Modi had
called for the BJP to reach out to Dalits and members of backward communities
since the “nationalists are with us.”
The BJP reacted to the report sharply.
Mahender Pandey, the office secretary of the BJP, issued a two-page press release in which he called the
story “fictitious,” a result of the “irresponsible attitude of the Newspaper,”
and deemed the Indian Express guilty of “following the vacuous
approach of the Congress & Co and Kejriwal & Co.” Pandey added that he
hoped the “said Newspaper will play the role of creative journalism instead of
doing fictional reporting and nefarious plotting to defame the government and
work like a negative opposition.” This press release, which demanded a public
apology from the Indian Express, was sent to various news
organisations across the country. The subtext of the note was clear: the
hallmark of good journalism would be to publish only what the prime minister
wanted known; the ruling party had nothing but disdain for source-based
reporting of any kind.
The message was
presumably intended for those news organisations that are perceived to be an
integral part of Modi’s pet peeve, “Lutyen’s Delhi” - a term the prime minister
has appropriated to conjure the image of an ideological dump yard in the heart
of Delhi, comprising anti-Modi voices that are led by the English media. This
crowd, according to Modi, has not spared anyone over the
years, including his illustrious Gujarati predecessors such as Vallabhbhai
Patel and Morarji Desai.
The fundamental
contradiction between Modi and the Indian Express lies in the
positions that they occupy on the free-speech spectrum. One is a publication
that has built itself on a legacy of unrelenting journalism. Over the past two
years, the Indian Express has only added to this oeuvre with
work such as its story on the increase in communal tensions in Uttar Pradesh and
Bihar since May 2014, its investigation on the Panama Papers, and its
coverage of banks that wrote off over one lakh crore in bad
debts between 2013 and 2015. (It bears mentioning that since the Uri attack on
18 September 2016 and the surgical strikes that were reportedly conducted by
the Indian Army on the night straddling 28 and 29 September, some of the
paper’s coverage has appeared to toe the government line, raising
eyebrows and inviting
criticism.) The other is a politician who wears his contempt for
the media - which is bazaaru, or for
sale, as far as he is concerned - on his sleeve.
Modi has often
attempted to control both the media and the message through means fair and
foul. His most favoured and effective tool remains his inaccessibility. The
prime minister does not take questions from the media and even if he does, the
interviews are granted as favours to hand-picked journalists after he has
approved the questions. A senior television reporter who covers the BJP told
me, “Information flow is only one way—top-down. Even ordinary information like
the prime minister’s Uttar Pradesh campaign schedule is only given out by the
BJP or even the RSS. Nothing comes from the PMO.”—the prime minister’s office.
The media has been
under attack across the country, including and apart from states that are
governed by the BJP. Over the past two years, criticism or even questions
regarding the government’s claims have been dangerously branded as a betrayal
of the nation. This is symptomatic of a culture that has thrived and grown
during Modi’s tenure as the prime minister: intolerance against any form of
dissent. In May 2016, Hoot, a media news and criticism website, reported that there had been 22 instances of assault on
members of the Indian press over the course of the first four months of the
year, with Chhattisgarh, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh leading the pack. The
BJP-ruled Chhattisgarh is a particularly stark example of the party’s
abhorrence for a critical press. Recently, the state police reportedly burnteffigies of academics,
civil-rights activists and journalists for their “anti-national opposition” to
the state’s machinery.
India ranks 133 out of
180—lower than the Central African Republic and Congo Brazzaville—in the latest World Press Freedom Index, released
by Reporters Without Borders, an international non-profit organisation. Yet,
since the country’s nationalistic fervour has been impervious to any dents over
the past few months, it would not be surprising if the ruling party and the
Indian media sought solace in the knowledge that India is ranked higher than
Pakistan. The report noted that, “Journalists and bloggers are attacked and
anathematised by various religious groups that are quick to take offense.”
“Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” it added, “seems indifferent to these threats
and problems, and there is no mechanism for protecting journalists.”
The most disturbing of
these attacks are the ones that target journalists belonging to minority communities.
The communally charged atmosphere that the Sangh Parivar has perpetuated has
made it difficult for journalists who belong to these communities to carry out
their jobs with a sense of security. As Josy Joseph, the national-security
editor of The Hindu, told the digital news platform Scroll, “When I did
stories against the UPA, nobody turned around and said, ‘you’re a BJP man, or a
Communist or a Christian.’ Today when I do a story against the government, the
first thing I hear is ‘You’re a Christian, a Sonia Gandhi agent from the
Vatican.’”
Mohammad Ali, also a reporter with The Hindu, echoed
Joseph when he told me, “It is not that during the UPA regime my identity was
not a problem while reporting. But now, things have become bad. It is very easy
to call out my identity whenever the story appears to go against the BJP and
its supporters.” Ali, who is writing a book on the mob lynching of Mohammad
Akhlaque in Dadri, said that he only reveals his name when he has achieved a
certain level of comfort with the people he is interviewing. During our
conversation, he recalled sitting with the alleged assailants of Mohammad
Akhlaque when one of the elderly women in the group suddenly said, “Why are the katuas” - a
derogatory Hindi slang for ritually circumcised Muslims - “getting so much
coverage by the media?” “I immediately got up,” said Ali, “made an excuse,
and hurriedly exited from Dadri.”
Even for this story,
it has been difficult to elicit an on-the-record response from most
journalists. Those in support of Mukul fear that speaking up for him could cost
them their jobs. Those opposing his boycott on grounds that the “prime minister
is popularly elected” are loath to be publically identified with the current
regime. This speaks volumes about the success of Modi’s media-gag policy. It
underscores the fear, the sense of defeat and the reluctance to stand out that
is afflicting the practitioners of journalism. Meanwhile, Mukul, who said that
he has been under immense pressure to attend the ceremony - both from his peers
and the management at the Indian Express - is relieved that event is
finally underway. “I don’t fear the consequences,” he said.
