1984

Manufacturing Lies:
The Ungodly Nexus Between the Indian Media & the Government Propaganda Machine
Part I

PRAVEEN DONTHI

On 19 November 1987, during the protracted final phase of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Indian Airlines flight IC 452 from Kabul landed at New Delhi’s International Airport. Shortly after its arrival, a security guard spotted ammunition cartridges rolling out over the tarmac from a damaged crate, one in a consignment of 22 that had arrived on the plane. Airport staff began an X-ray examination of every box. Apart from cartridges, the scan revealed at least one rocket launcher.

Police and customs officers took the shipment for a haul of terrorist contraband. While airport personnel argued over who should get credit for the seizure, a man in mufti appeared and identified himself as a Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) operative. Before the munitions could be properly inventoried, he confiscated the crates, claiming they were government property.

The journalist Dhiren Bhagat broke the story on 24 April 1988, in Bombay’s Indian Post and the London Observer. The damaged crate “was the sort of slip that journalism thrives on,” he later wrote. According to the freight bill, the consignment was telecom equipment bound for the Director General Communications in Sanchar Bhawan -- a non-existent official. Looking for an explanation, Bhagat contacted the cabinet secretary, BG Deshmukh, to whom R&AW reported. Deshmukh said he could neither confirm nor deny R&AW’s involvement.

In his article, Bhagat speculated that the smuggled arms had been destined for Punjab, where the so-called Khalistan insurgency was at its peak. In March 1988, there had been several rocket attacks on police and paramilitary units in the state -- though nobody was hit -- and such weaponry hadn’t been used anywhere else in the country following the November shipment.

Although Bhagat didn’t say as much, it seemed plausible that government forces had staged the assaults as a pretext for stepping up military intervention in Punjab (and discrediting Pakistan).

“Indian officials have expressed concern about the increased firepower of the Sikh militants, who in the last week have used shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles, similar to those used by guerrillas in the war in Afghanistan,” Sanjoy Hazarika wrote in the New York Times in early April. “Officials here say they have been unable to confirm reports that these weapons have been smuggled across the Afghan and Pakistani borders into Punjab.”

Bhagat expected his report to kick up a storm in the national press and in parliament. “I was wrong,” he wrote. “Nothing appeared. Nothing happened. No questions were asked.”

He took it upon himself to meet with parliamentarians and newspaper editors. Most wanted nothing to do with the story. The Times of India and the Indian Express flatly refused to touch it. Other papers discussed the incident, but decided not to pursue it on the grounds of “national interest”.

“I don’t dispute your facts,” one editor told Bhagat. “But you are trying to frustrate my plans.” The editor apparently hoped to incite military aggression and “bash up Pakistan”.

Several members of the Rajya Sabha finally raised the issue in parliament, on 29 April. The next day, anonymous official sources issued a carefully worded denial to select journalists.

That the government armed Punjab terrorists was “totally unfounded and preposterous”, the sources said (though Bhagat never claimed the weapons were for terrorists). Many papers carried the counterstatement on their front page; the Times of India story was headlined, “Report on Arms Import Denied”. (A few days later, Canada’s Globe and Mail ran a piece titled “Servile press spikes scoop”, which said Bhagat had “blasted a great hole in the theory that Sikh extremists are getting sophisticated Soviet-made rockets from Pakistan.”)

Bhagat soon confronted the information and broadcasting secretary, Gopi Arora, who was involved in trying to defuse the Bofors scandal. “The specific allegation that R&AW imported arms on 19 November has not been denied,” Arora said. “We do not comment on such things.”

Bhagat reported Arora’s comments in the Observer and, on 5 May, during a debate on extending president’s rule in Punjab, Atal Bihari Vajpayee read out the story in parliament. P Chidambaram, then the union minister of state for home affairs overseeing internal security, admitted that R&AW organised the shipment.

“No government ever comments publicly on the activities of intelligence agencies, but let me assure the House that the equipment which came in has been accounted for,” he added. “It is highly unfair, preposterous, and wrong to suggest that any part of any equipment found its way into Punjab or to the hands of terrorists in Punjab.”

This was probably the only time the work of an intelligence agency was discussed in such detail in parliament, but Chidambaram’s admission was carried prominently only by The Hindu newspaper. The Indian Express completely ignored it.

Operation Black Thunder II, a paramilitary raid on so-called Khalistani separatists purportedly holed up in Amritsar’s Golden Temple, took place the following week. The entire episode seemed to lay bare the Indian press’s unwillingness to properly investigate the country’s intelligence agencies and matters of internal security. Instead of upholding their duty to the public, newspapers -- while suppressing stories, pursuing anti-Pakistan agendas, over-relying on anonymous government sources, and taking an indifferent attitude to the corroboration of facts -- seemed to hide behind the aegis of national interest.

*   *   *   *   *

In the years since Bhagat’s story broke, reporting on internal security has remained murky, beset by the same practices that kept R&AW’s smuggling operation off the front pages. Few national security journalists bring to their stories the tenacity and critical eye that Bhagat seemed to have.

Today, the beat is at once the most glamorous and the most obscure -- dominated by a smart, largely hawkish boys’ club that tends to see itself (and be seen) as inhabiting a tidal zone between the media and intelligence agencies. As one editor described them, these are the “guys who work with the guys who work on the frontlines of the national interest”.

Reporting on major crimes, insurgencies, Islamic and Hindu terrorism, the Indo-Pak conflict, and other border disputes gives their work an air of unparalleled importance. “No other story will give you this kind of display,” the former Open political editor Hartosh Singh Bal said of terrorism’s ability to capture front-page real estate.

Perhaps as a result, reporters on the “natsec” beat -- as it’s widely called -- tend to get special treatment: they file late, keep their sources completely anonymous, and are rarely questioned by editors. “A magazine like ours, or even the Times of India with its vast resources, is invested in one journalist to cover security affairs,” the Outlook editor-in-chief, Krishna Prasad, said. “We have to trust him because he is the specialist.”

Since the work of the intelligence agencies is by design clandestine -- and damaged crates, or their equivalents, are rare -- many journalists rely on leaked information. There’s little time, or motivation, for proper corroboration. One mid-career journalist told me that the lifespan of a bomb blast story on the front page of a national daily is a maximum of three days.

“You have to do as many stories as you can and get a good display,” he said. “After a week, it’s buried deep inside.” The price of access to early and ongoing information is a willingness to report it more or less as it comes, without too much regard for its provenance. The editorial director of the Sunday Guardian, MJ Akbar, told me, “In daily newspaper time pressure, sometimes you have to accept the story, but the next day you have to go and check.”

Jason Burke, the Guardian reporter and author of Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam, took a different view. “I couldn’t disagree more strongly that a journalist is as good as his or her source,” he told me. “No -- the point of a journalist is to take lots of sources, take the information from them, listen to what they say and interrogate that information.”

Unfortunately, a failure to do the difficult work of journalism is common around the world; one of the reasons is that “people have inordinate faith in security services,” Burke said. “Readers, policymakers and often journalists are struck by the spurious glamour and credibility that surrounds secrecy.”

Indeed, many Indian journalists refer to intelligence officers, and even agency chiefs, not as sources but as friends, calling them by their first names or nicknames, and inviting them to Diwali celebrations and other family events. At its core, however, the relationship between reporters and agents is a crude barter economy. Most agency work, especially at the domestically focused Intelligence Bureau (IB), is on the political desk -- tracking dissidents, businessmen and various politicians: the sort of people with whom journalists are relatively free to meet.

“One officer told me very bluntly, ‘My job is not to give you stories but to take stories from you. If there is a steady flow of information from you, once in a while I might consider giving you a story myself,’” a mid-ranking reporter with a leading daily told me.

A senior Mumbai journalist described agency information gatherers as “hungry caterpillars”.

“It doesn’t matter from which part of the country the information is from,” she said. “Intelligence is after all about connecting the dots. If I get some documents from Orissa, I would give them to the Nagpur police and get some story in return.”

“My understanding is what you bring to the table is important to build contacts, and then you build confidence by writing about issues,” Shishir Gupta, the deputy executive editor of the Hindustan Times, said about cultivating sources within the IB.

The editor for special projects at the Times of India, Josy Joseph, gave me an example of the sort of exchange that builds close relationships with intelligence agencies. In August 2004, he traveled to Nepal to interview Jamim Shah, a suspected member of Dawood Ibrahim’s gang. The Indian government had just written a letter to the Nepalese government asking for details about Shah.

“Shah was emphatic when he denied any wrong on his part during a long interview this correspondent had with him on a rain-swept evening at his office in Kathmandu,” Joseph wrote in the Times of India. “The man laughed and often kept poker face while denying being in a Pakistani jail, or being Dawood’s front man, or even a smuggler.”

As soon as the story ran, the IB and R&AW approached Joseph to find out if the interview was recorded. “After listening to his voice, they realised they were tapping the wrong guy all along,” Joseph told me. The IB wanted Joseph to take one of its operatives back to Nepal to show him where he met Shah, but Joseph said he declined.

If there’s an information-feeding industry in the country, the hotels and cafés of Lutyen’s Delhi are part of its outermost layer. On any given day, mid-level agents float around the capital meeting journalists, in haunts such as The Ambassador, Hotel Janpath and, more recently, Khan Market.

“It’s an incestuous city,” Joseph said. Like other experienced national security reporters, Joseph has access to senior sources within the agencies. “One day, I was sitting with an IB joint director in Delhi,” he said. “He got a call from his boss, the IB chief, saying Shishir Gupta will come to discuss something. He asked me to wait and went out and met him on the lawn,” which is visible from the joint director’s office. Later, as Joseph was leaving, he saw NDTV’s Sudhi Ranjan Sen getting his tyre changed outside the gate. “So, at one point of the day, there were three journalists from three leading news organisations at the IB office,” Joseph said. (The first time I went to meet a joint director, he had just left on some emergency -- but the personal assistant who met me asked if I wanted to leave or take any documents.)

For journalists who prove their worth, the rewards of these close relationships can go far beyond career-boosting scoops. Soon after Joseph shared his Jamim Shah tapes with the IB and R&AW, he planned a stint at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, in the United States. One of the intelligence agencies offered to take care of the full cost -- about Rs. 30 lakh. (Joseph said he turned it down and took out a loan from the State Bank of Travancore instead.)

Saikat Datta, the national security editor for the Hindustan Times, also said that R&AW volunteered to pay for him to study overseas. One senior journalist told me the IB offered him a monthly retainer, like the kind newspapers pay to stringers.

Continued tomorrow ...

[Courtesy: Caravan. Edited for sikhchic.com]

December 17, 2013

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