Kids Corner

India's "security" agencies are the country's main purveyors of contraband weapons ... which are often planted amidst those they wish to malign and target.

1984

Manufacturing Lies:
Part II

PRAVEEN DONTHI

 

 

 

The Ungodly Nexus Between India's Media & the Government's Propaganda Machine

 

 

 

Continued from yesterday ...

 

PART II

These dynamics -- from permissiveness in the newsroom to incestuousness with sources -- help sustain India's "security" establishment.

In the name of the national interest, the country’s various intelligence and investigative agencies -- Raw & Analysis Wing (R&AW); Intelligence Bureau (IB); the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI); the National Investigation Agency (NIA); the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO); and Military Intelligence (MI) -- operate with a secrecy that makes them more or less immune to political accountability and public scrutiny.

“Even outside the government, there was a tacit acceptance of this reality and the media, courts, scholars and analysts, etc., implicitly respected this privilege,” wrote the celebrated former IB chief Ajit Kumar Doval, a long-time agency operative who led the organisation from 2004 to 2005. Important stories that do leak out may never make it into print.

The former R&AW chief Vikram Sood said that after he developed a rapport with journalists, they would call him to confirm information. “Then you can ask them to hold back if the stories are not in the national interest. You say, ‘Oh, come on. Let’s talk,’” he told me, smiling.

Even if defending the nation were journalists’ primary responsibility, it’s hard to ascertain if sources are genuinely attempting to make the country safer.

“Every act of irregularity has been committed in the name of protecting the national interest,” the former IB joint director Maloy Krishna Dhar wrote in his memoir, Open Secrets. “This is a bogus claim.”

Many agents freely pursue their own agendas: “some make money out of the sacred national trust, some advance career prospects and a few dabble in ideological pursuits.”

The same goes for reporters. “There are many journalists who help us out,” a former R&AW official told me. “There is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and every person has his own motivation. Some did it out of patriotism and some due to allure.”

“Even when reporters claim deep insights, they are shaped by vested interests and lobbies active within the agencies,” Josy Joseph said. According to him, some of the greatest causes of distortion are anti-Muslim prejudice; intra-agency ideological conflicts, such as those between old-guard socialists and their capitalist counterparts; and business opportunities opened up by new intelligence technologies.

A longstanding rivalry between the IB and R&AW also produces a lot of leaks and deceptions, as the agencies compete to discredit one another -- and for the public kudos their classified operations don’t allow. Throughout the agencies, those with stakes to augment or defend “create narratives that suit their interests,” Joseph said.

In the hall of mirrors created by disinformation, the job of a reporter is enormously challenging.

“If R&AW has generated a report about external factors outside the country and you are not allowed to say it is a R&AW report, how else do you then say I am aware of these things?” Saikat Datta said. “IB may give you clues, but may not give you the secret information that connects the dots. How do you then build a picture from a journalistic point of view?”

Too often, national security reporters fail to live up to this challenge.

“Many people cite intelligence agencies but probably they may not have access,” Datta said. The information they attribute to security officials frequently comes from the police. Still others make do by putting expert opinion in the mouths of fabricated anonymous sources. The executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management, Ajai Sahni, told me reporters often come to discuss security issues with him, because it’s easier than cultivating sources.

“Then they attribute one quote to me and the rest to intelligence officials, informed sources” or sources in the home affairs ministry, he said.

Shortcuts such as these are an open secret in newsrooms.

“The positive thing about intelligence stories is that nobody will confirm or deny it,” said Vinay Kumar, the Delhi bureau chief of The Hindu newspaper.  “If there is information of three lines, you will produce 700 words.”

MJ Akbar told me that “Security as a subject has become so sacrosanct that you can slip anything under, between and above the radar.”

The costs of collusion and malpractice are high.

“We don’t question the facts given to us enough, and some of it has had dangerous consequences,” Datta said. In particular, anti-Muslim bias -- only partly connected to the legitimately threatening activities of organisations such as the ISI and Lashkar-e-Taiba -- seems to pervade most reporting on internal security and acts of terrorism, even though there have now been many high-profile cases of terror committed by Hindu extremists.

Innocent civilians -- often Muslims, sometimes journalists -- have been detained, jailed, fired from their jobs, and otherwise ruined by false accusations reproduced without corroboration by the press.

“Just because something is supposedly classified doesn’t authenticate it in anyway at all,” Jason Burke said. “Just because something is secret doesn’t make it true.”

*   *   *   *   *

Of all the national security reporters working today, 45-year-old Praveen Swami is the most well known. Swami, the strategic affairs editor at The Hindu, began his career making documentaries on “Khalistani terrorists” in Uttar Pradesh, in the early 1990s, and then joined Frontline, where he reported on the “insurrection” in Punjab and an intensifying war in Kashmir.

This was the period when India’s national security beat took shape, as newspapers (and the country’s first wave of cable television news shows) began to devote reporters to covering the hostilities. With allegations of a nuclearising Pakistan facilitating insurgents in both states, the conflicts seemed to pose an unprecedented threat to South Asian security. Journalists who made contacts with the intelligence agencies during this time -- like Swami, whose pieces were often neat, confident narratives, rich with detail that was otherwise hard to find -- soon increased their stature in newsrooms and the national media.

In the subsequent decades, Swami has gained a reputation for his searching political analyses and for an academic style of journalism bolstered by wide reading, especially in history. The former IB chief Doval, who became close to Swami late in his career, wrote that he saw a “researcher’s doggedness and an intellectual’s curiosity” in the journalist, “traits an intelligence professional normally frowns on!”

But Swami has also been criticised for his proximity to the country’s intelligence agencies, especially the IB.

“If there is one infallible indicator of what the top Indian intelligence agencies are thinking or cooking up, it is this: Praveen Swami’s articles,” a Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association report from 2010 said. “Each time the security establishment wishes to push a certain angle to this bomb blast or that, Swami’s articles appear magically, faithfully reflecting the intelligence reports.”

A former R&AW official, who lamented his agency’s inability to cultivate journalists as effectively as the IB, concurred, calling the IB’s relationship with Swami “a great operation”.

“They have intellectually won him over,” the official said. “That’s the best kind of operation, you know.”

Swami’s critics find this intimacy seeping out in his writing. His reporting relies heavily on generic unnamed sources -- “investigators believe”, “sources said”, “according to police” -- and there’s a belligerence and one-size-fits-all Islamophobia to his analyses that seems of a piece with the security establishment’s dominant worldview.

In Delhi’s media circles, there are several widely circulated rumours about Swami’s relationship to the IB. One claims that the agency did him a great favour early in his career, and that he remains indebted to it. Another says the IB has a dossier with which it is blackmailing him. Although these rumours are totally unsubstantiated, and Swami denied such claims, they capture something about just how closely Swami is thought to have toed an agency line.

In November, I went to meet Swami in his office at the Press Trust of India building in Delhi. He had just rejoined the Hindu Group, where he has spent most of his career, after an eight-month stint as the national security analyst at CNN-IBN and Firstpost. His office was still empty, and he was in a very good mood. During our 90-minute conversation about the national security beat and his work, he was affable if a bit pedantic, responding to criticisms with an uneasy smile.

Swami told me he has “an old-fashioned liberal view” of the world, though he also said his ideas “don’t fall neatly into any camp”.

He explained his personal politics by paraphrasing Sumedh Saini, Punjab’s Director General of Police, whom he described as “a student of history and a very controversial police officer back in the day”. (Saini has an abduction and murder case pending personally against him in a special CBI court in Delhi, relating to the disappearance of three people from Ludhiana in 1994, and was accused of at least one other human rights violation during the years of the Punjab insurgency.)

“I know the borders of nation states change all the time,” Swami said. “Maybe there will be a Khalistan tomorrow, or not. I am not particularly bothered. But if somebody thinks they can run around with a Kalashnikov shooting at people in my area, they have another thing coming.” (Ajit Doval and Saini are both thanked in the acknowledgements of Swami’s book India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad: The Covert War in Kashmir, 1947–2004.)

This philosophy fits with the ultimately favourable view Swami has taken of acts such as state-directed torture, the importance of which he came to appreciate during his years stomping around Punjab and Kashmir.

“In our popular culture, the torturer is almost always a sadist or a coward; a concentration-camp commandant or dictator’s deranged sidekick: never a soldier who is, after all, one of us,” he wrote in London’s the Daily Telegraph, where he was briefly diplomatic editor in late 2010 and 2011. Wikileaks had just published documents about Western forces resorting to torture in Afghanistan.

“Much of the torture the leaks detail does not appear to have been driven by sadism,” he added. “It was carried out in the hope of ending the depredations of terrorists who have killed tens of thousands.”

One outraged reader commented, “You need mental help, Praveen.”

Swami’s hawkish stance is a large part of why critics call him an apologist and shill for the country’s intelligence services.

He dismissed the notion. “I wish I was working as closely with the agencies as people think I am,” he joked. “I would be much happier if there was an actual debate about these things as opposed to personal invective.” He feels he has been unfairly singled out by critics of the security beat, and explained that what he reports is not exclusive: “Ninety percent of what I wrote, you will find it in plenty of other papers as well. My peers, like Shishir Gupta and Saikat Datta, often complain saying, ‘We wrote the same thing but nobody is cribbing about it on the net.’”

He also presented himself as more discerning than his critics allow. The worst thing about the national security beat, he said, is “you have to listen to lies from morning till evening from everybody concerned. From this mess, somehow it’s your job to try and distil what seems plausible.”

Swami’s account of himself is perhaps more level-headed than his work. 

 

Continued tomorrow ... PART III

 

[Courtesy: Caravan. Edited for sikhchic.com

December 18, 2013

 

 

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Part II"









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