How India coloured the British media map

How India coloured the British media map

 

London, Nov 18 (IANS) India is being sought out for a new place on the media map of Britain as what a senior editor called the "stabilising superpower" of the South Asian region.

Media interest in Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was a record high on his tour of the U.S. and Britain that ended last week. If Vajpayee did not appear more on TV shows, it was because he could not fit them into his schedule.

As it turned out a meeting between Vajpayee and his British counterpart Tony Blair that was to have gone live on BBC was replaced by coverage of the air crash in New York. But in the print media Vajpayee was given a degree of attention that was unusual. In the past Indian prime ministers have come and gone without a word in the media.
Vajpayee`s visit this time was covered in The Times, the Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph. The Independent and The Scotsman carried photographs. This kind of coverage came on a day when most other news was wiped off the pages by news of the New York air crash and the fall of Kabul to the Northern Alliance.

"The coverage was satisfactory given the constraints of a one-day working visit," Navdeep Suri, spokesman for the Indian High Commission, told IANS. "On a day of dramatic developments like that, this was about as much as can be expected."

But this too was small in relation to the great interest senior British editors took in the visit. With most interviews ruled out, some top editors in the British media attended a get-together, arranged at the exclusive Veeraswamy Restaurant by the high commission, with their counterparts from India who were accompanying the prime minister.

"We have never before seen so much media interest in India," said the editor of a Hindi daily. "It shows that whatever position they take they have to take India into account," he said.

The British editors who attended the get-together included Michael Binyon, leading writer on foreign affairs for The Times; Leonard Doyle, foreign editor of The Independent; Edwina Morton, diplomatic editor for The Economist; Ewen Macaskill, diplomatic editor for The Guardian; Tim Sebastian of BBC`s Hard Talk; Caroline Howie, head of news for BBC Television; Muftah Suwadein, chief executive of Al Jazeera in London; and veteran journalist and writer Philip Knightly.

BBC editors said they had tried hard to secure an interview with Vajpayee or with a senior leader accompanying him. "It`s a pity no one was available, because this was a real opportunity to put India`s view across," said a senior BBC editor.

India has become suddenly important in a way very different from Pakistan, the editor said. "We see India as the stabilising power of the region whose influence will be more steady and long-term than that of Pakistan."

The unprecedented interest follows an unprecedented political situation in the subcontinent. By all accounts it has placed India firmly on the media map in London, a city many regard as the media capital of the world.