|
The Red Money
| |
The CPI(M)
has opposed FDI in Indian media, but is FDI the real culprit? Is
the ethnic-money propelled media any more sensitive to ethnic
minorities and issues? Is only people’s money related to
people’s concerns? An Open Letter to Comrade Karat |
|
Dear Mr. Prakash
Karat,
 The
release of the draft resolution of the Communist Party (Marxist) on
20th January in
New Delhi
provides me the opportunity to write to you about what a religio-political
activist feels about the working of your party and the non-working
of the ideals of communism in India and Punjab.
I like leftists
not for their ideology but for their humanism. I have many leftist
friends and with most of them, I follow the diktat “agree to
disagree”. As such, what applies to my friends, also applies to my
little understanding of the left politics in
India.
I have always
felt that the Communists are atheists but good human beings. I have
great reverence for the role played by your wife -Brinda Karat with
a score of other activists, during the anti-Sikh carnage of 1984,
the role of the Ghaddhar Party prior to 1947 and the work of the
committed workers of the CPI(ML) in Gadhchiroli and other parts of
Maharashtra
and Madhya Pradesh. It will continue to be so as I recognise the
human spirit which permeates the ground work that these individuals
and those associated with them are doing.
When I started
taking keen interest in the politics of
Punjab, I
studied the role of the Punjab communists. Barring a few
exceptions, to my mind there was a world of difference between the
leftists I encountered in Punjab and those I had worked with in the
civil rights movement of
Bombay.
The Punjabi communist was deliberately agnostic or atheist; his
entire political maneouvre was centered around weaning Sikh youth
away from what he perceived were the tentacles of religion and this
would include creating an atmosphere for the Sikh youth to shorn
their hair against the tenets of their religion. Adequately financed
by erstwhile
Russia,
the left of Punjab worked zealously to this end, but ultimately
failed though they did manage to sow the seeds of hate and revenge.
They could not
eulogise or dwell upon the work of Banda Singh Bahadur, who in 1711
proclaimed that the land belonged to the tiller. To them everything
religious was antithetical to their new-found love of Communism and
more so of Marxism.
 Significantly,
in the last few years, the veneer of equality and socialism worn by
Indian Marxists has been shattered, many a time by themselves. The
opportunism of the Marxists came to the fore in the acceptance,
partial acceptance or non-acceptance of various components of a
liberal market economy. Nandigram is a classic example of the
dilemma of the red guards; they have been caught off-guard and have
resorted to the worst kind of violent reprisals seriously
endangering their humanist streak.
As you know,
sometime back, this country decided to go liberal. It bid goodbye
to the Nehruvian model of socialist economy and sought refuge and
progress in laissez-faire. This was a world-wide phenomenon
and India
perhaps had no choice as it had not developed any model of its own.
 In this diatribe
I would like to dwell upon your party’s proposal of seeking stoppage
of FDI investment in the electronic and print media, which in the
views of your party is “increasingly becoming a big business
enterprise.” There is no doubt that like the media all over the
world, the Indian media too is becoming a gargantuan persona. My
question is “what is not big in
India today?”
Every urban family wants a big television screen –a home cinema, a
big house, a big mall, a gigantic city centre, a vast housing
colony, a huge farm house, et al.
In the massive
consumerist culture that is building in the country, the customer
and not the reader, wants a big newspaper—big in size, big in colour,
rich in variety, big on Bollywood, but not necessarily in content.
The television channels too are becoming gigantic in size and
resources. Every single channel of the country spends prime time on
astrology and tarot-reading.
The bourgeois
industrialist wants to have a big chunk of the poor farmer’s rural
lands so that capitalists and communists can team up to serve the
poor! The way this scenario is developing, the trend seems
unstoppable.
 Can the fourth
estate trail society? After all, it has the self-imposed notion of
being the precursor of change. In the Indian media industry today, a
large portion of the resources required for gigantic expansion plans
is generated locally and competition is egging on each one of them
to be bigger than the other. Even without FDI, edition after
edition of our big dailies is imitating the big newspapers of the
so-called ‘anti-communist’ West.
Your party has
alleged that foreign direct investment has made the media
“pro-Western, anti-political and anti-Communist.” In a country where
3 billion dollars can be garnered in less than 60 seconds, do you
really think that all ills associated with media, can be attributed
to foreign direct investment? How can we be selective to have a car
plant in Singur but shy away from a newspaper industry in the
backwaters of the capital of the country? Do we want to eat the cake
and have it too?
Political
parties need big donations. With small donations, they cannot run
election campaigns, they cannot build plush offices, they cannot
attain competitive mobility and they cannot own newspapers and
cannot float news channels.
 It is very
interesting to see the rich and not-so-rich donating for peoples’
papers; when the flow stops, the bulletin’s inks fade. Prey,
what is the big ethical difference between FDI-propelled media and
ethnic money-fuelled one? Would the FDI-backed media have presented
a more objective analysis of your party's shame in Nandigram and
Singur? Did the ethnic money-fuelled media do justice to covering
the discrimination against
Punjab
and Sikhs in the years preceding the militancy? If only anything,
news magazines backed by FDI money may not have been tempted by huge
advertisements issued by the
Gujarat
government and would not have perhaps (I repeat, perhaps) be
distributing CDs extolling the virtues of Modi regime.
In The Hindu, a
newspaper that your party often finds favourably inclined even when
it faces heat on Singur elsewhere, P.Sainath brought out so
tellingly how hundreds of journalists were jostling for space at the
Lakme India Fashion Week when just one hour's flight away,
Vidarbha's cotton farmers were committing suicide and there were
only six accredited journalists covering the tragic developments.
Every single one of the journalists at the Lakme India Fashion Week
worked for the media that has no FDI. If you are surprised that
there were only hundreds and not thousands at the fashion week, it
was because the rest wanted to cover Lakshmi Mittal's daughter’s
wedding at the Palace de Versailles.
What worse will
the FDI do? Or are you afraid that they will tell the true story of
communism's failure in India? Or the hypocrisy of the Indian
establishment that has used the media as an in-house weapon to be
wielded against ethnic minorities by terming them anti-national as
per the convenience of RAW and IB or the anti-minority Indian
political leadership? Some overzealous columnists and monopolistic
groups have cried foul saying that FDI investment would comprise
sovereignty and ‘national interest’ of the country. When the debate
is lost, this is a typical argument of last resort.
Comrade Karat
Sahib –you and your party are not afraid of FDI; what you are afraid
of is that with FDI, the muscle to control media will be lost.
It is my view
that as the politics of the country becomes more personalized, petty
and pecuniary, issue-based journalism and investigative reporting is
likely to get a boost with international partnerships.
If a hundred
percent ownership of the satellite television industry could not
change the way this country is governed, then it is futile to do a
drubbing of an unknown enemy. Page 3 of the satellite television
channels, including the news channels, is no different from the Page
3 of the print media. Still, as Sucheta Dalal puts it, “our first
access point is no longer the newspaper, but television or the
Internet.”
India and the
world will see a major confluence of mobile, print, television and
Internet technologies which cannot be stopped by any ideology or
geographical boundary. Technology is an over-riding factor which
every political party and personality can ignore at its own peril.
I think we need
to look somewhere else to find out the root causes for a society
recoiling into a value-system collapse.
Rab Rakha.
Jagmohan
Singh
Jagmohan Singh is a political commentator and
his column, Open Letters, appears every week.
He may be contacted at
jsbigideas@gmail.com
23 January 2008
|
Read Also