SWAMINOMICS: Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar
I hate war and the jingosim that accompanies it. Not just because it kills and maims people, but because jingositic passion subverts all our values and standards, and degrades us in ways that people scarcely notice in the heat of the moment.
I will not try to illustrate this by examples from the Kargil war: Passions still run too high. Let me take readers back to the 1971 war with Pakistan.
Convinced that Mujib-ur Rahman was going to secede and form an independent Bangladesh, the Pakistan Army arrested Mujib, and let loose a reign of terror which killed lakhs. Other Bangla leaders headed by Tajuddin Ahmed declared independence, set up a provisional capital at Chuadanga, and organised the Mukti Bahini to take on the Pakistan Army.
In The Times of India, my bureau chief asked me to produce a daily tally of gains and losses, summarising which side was gaining where. I tried to present as fair a picture as I could. But soon the Pakistan Army smashed all before it. A day soon came when the provisional Bangla government abandoned Chuadanga.
I duly highlighted the collapse in my column on gains and losses. No, said my bureau chief, it would be unpatriotic to highlight the rout. Instead, he said, lead with a snippet saying Bangla guerrillas had disabled a local power station; add a few more snippets about Bangla feats of valour; and only then mention that the provisional Bangladeshi government had fled Chuadanga.
I did as I was ordered, but felt black with anger. What was patriotic about distorting events and fooling our own readers? How did distortion by The Times of India, which was not read at all in Bangladesh, improve Bangla morale or discourage Pakistani morale? Worse followed. The Indian government invented a place called Mujibnagar within Bangladesh from which the provisional government supposedly operated. In fact, Mujibnagar was simply a part of Calcutta where the Bangla leaders were housed. The Indian press dutifully swallowed this myth. All very patriotic, you understand.
Soon afterwards, the government organised a press tour of the Bangla refugee camps in West Bengal and Tripura. I was nominated by my newspaper, and found it a fascinating experience.
But when I returned to Delhi, my bureau chief was terribly worried. Swami, what on earth have you been up to? he asked. Puzzled, I said I had simply gone round the camps with other journalists talking to the refugees. But, said my boss, officials complain that you were asking all sorts of unpatriotic question.
I could not comprehend the accusation. What on earth is an unpatriotic question? I asked. My boss had no idea. All he knew was that officials said I was endangering the country's security. I asked him to find out what these supposedly unpatriotic questions were. He got not reply, just a blanket condemnation. I had been damned with no tabling of any evidence. To be on the safe side, the piece I wrote was not used at all by the paper.
Soon afterwards, the defence ministry asked newspapers to nominate candidates for a war correspondent's course. My newspaper nominated me. But the government declared I was unfit to attend such a course. National security, you understand, was at risk. As in a Kafka novel, I stood accused of I knew not what, and had been declared guilty.
The war came. The world over, journalists reported that it began in November when Indian forces crossed the East Pakistan border (many foreign journalists saw Indian troops crossing). But the tame Indian press was told this was all Pakistani propaganda, and swallowed it. India was possibly the only country in the world unaware that the war had already begun in November. Pakistan struck back with an air strike on December 3rd, and the Indian government declared that Pakistan had started the war. Even today, most Indians are astounded to discover that the rest of the world believes it started in November.
The war was won quickly and decisively. I rejoiced, yet was bruised by the way it had degraded me and our reporting standards. But at least it's all over, I thought. Wrong again. A couple of years later, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was due to launch a new naval training ship. The Times of India nominated me to cover the event. Nothing doing, said the shocked government: National security will endangered if this guy reports.
One day, much later, I was taken off the black list. It helped, of course, that I focussed on economic reporting rather than defence matters.
Perhaps some incompetent clerk in the government simply lost the file on me. But the episode drove home to me how patriotism, which is much trumpeted as a virtue, has a terrible, repressive side which we all need to beware of.
We need to analyse Kargil and draw lessons from it without worrying about being accused of being unpatriotic.
Press analysis of the Kargil war was not as one-sided as in 1971. Yet I know of editors who censored inconvenient news inconvenient: It was the patriotic thing to do, they explained.
I disagree. I much prefer the candour, even the excesses of the US press, as exemplified by criticism of the war in Kosovo. Micheal Kelly, editor of the National Journal, suggested that the country would be better off if foreign policy was made by a ham sandwich rather than the secretary of state. After all, a ham sandwich would not have made promises incapable of fulfilment, would not have followed a policy aimed to stop ethnic cleansing, but which actually accelerated it.
Much of this sort of criticism was excessive. Yet the press must be a watchdog. Better an over-aggressive doberman than a government lap-dog.