Reporting India's diplomatic agenda

BY ANAND VARDHAN| IN Opinion | 10/09/2012

Why can't the largest selling newspaper in the country have reports on an important international summit from its own staffer?

Talking of the recent NAM summit, ANAND VARDHAN says the Hindi press had little to offer.

THE HINDI PRISM
Anand Vardhan

Isn’t there a great deal of truth in the observation that despite all that buzz around the “globalising world” and India’s self-perception as a “rising global power”, Indian media cannot claim to be your window to the world? More often than not, Indian media put an India-angle precondition for its engagement with international stories. This national lens for seeing the outside world is neither peculiar to Indian media nor has it gone unnoticed by keen watchers of Indian foreign policy and media. It shouldn’t surprise you that in his introduction to one of the most important works on Indian foreign policy to be published in recent years (Does the Elephant Dance?,Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2011), David Malone remarks: “As any other, the Indian media also suffers from limitations: it engages only fitfully with the rest of the world and tends towards analysis on issues international strictly in terms of India’s perspectives and interests.”

Even within this India-centric frame, it would be interesting to see how the Hindi press, vis-a-vis the English press in India, reported and commented on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent visit to Tehran to attend the Non Aligned Movement (NAM) summit. The way the press looked at it becomes more relevant because of some factors which had little to do with the summit per se. It was a summit (held every three years) which was more important for the diplomatic sensitivity of its venue (given Iran’s stand-off with the West on the nuclear issue and resultant sanctions) and the activities on the sidelines, than the tokenism of carrying the Nehruvian legacy of foreign policy forward in an altered international milieu of unipolarity, and now an emerging multipolarity of international order in the last two decades.

For starters, the build-up reports and commentary (a sort of preview of the meet) on India’s diplomatic agenda for the 16th NAM summit was not to be seen in major Hindi dailies--Dainik Bhaskar, Dainik Jagran, Hindustan, and Jansatta. Among the major English dailies--The Times Of India, Hindustan Times, The Indian Express, and The Hindu--only The Indian Express served some appetisers for the readers ahead of the summit. Pranab Dhal Samanta assessed: “PM visit to be low-key on India-Iran engagement” (Indian Express, 28.08.2012), while the daily’s strategic affairs editor and a prolific commentator on foreign policy, C. Raja Mohan, was of the opinion that the summit can provide an opportunity for India and Iran to explore mutual benefits but the rider is that “India must navigate turbulence of Iran-US and Iran-Saudi Arabia tensions” (“The Tehran Tightrope”, The Indian Express, 27.08.2012).

Dr Singh’s arrival

With the arrival of Dr Manmohan Singh in Tehran, the Hindi press began reporting and commenting on the summit and the Prime Minister’s bilateral meetings with the leaders of Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. So did the English press. Except the reports filed by Dr Bharat Agrawal for Dainik Bhaskar, the Hindi dailies (Dainik Jagran, Hindustan, and Jansatta) carried agency stories of Bhasha (the Hindi division of PTI). The major English dailies had reports filed by their own seasoned reporters” Sandeep Dikshit for The Hindu, Indrani Bagchi for The Times Of India, Pranab Dhal Samanta for The Indian Express, and Varghese K George for Hindustan Times. However, some English dailies were also dependent on agency reports. For instance, The Pioneer carried IANS reports, and to take an example from the world of financial dailies, Business Standard published PTI reports only.

Similar to the Hindi-English reporting budget divide in the coverage of the recent Olympics, Hindustan Times group and The Indian Express group have two questions to answer. First, while their English dailies had their presence there, why couldn’t the Hindi papers from their stable (Hindustan and Jansatta respectively) have their reporters there? And given they were not there, why couldn’t these papers use the translated versions of the reports filed by their colleagues reporting for the group from Tehran? However, the more pressing question is for Dainik Jagran: why can’t the largest selling newspaper in the country have reports on an important international summit from its own staffer?

Quite expectedly, in Hindi as well as in English papers, the prime display and front headlines were grabbed by an event on the sidelines of the summit--a 40- minute meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari. Dainik Bhaskar’s headline on the front page highlighted the Prime Minister’s reassertion of the demand for expediting action against the perpetrators of the Mumbai terror attacks (Pak ko karni hi hogi Mumbai hamle me karyavayee--Pak has to take action on Mumbai attacks, Dainik Bhashkar, 31.08.2012),while Hindustan had a more animate one (Zardari Ji, jaldi ho 26/11 ki sunwayee--Zardari Ji , speed up the hearings in 26/11 attacks, Hindustan 31.08.2012). Dainik Jagran also carried the story with a bold headline, though on its international page. The Hindi papers also took note of other bilateral engagements, for instance, Jansatta (30.08.2012) had a front-page story carrying the headline, Bharat-Iran varta me vyapar, suraksha, Syria mudde par hogi charcha-- Trade, Security, and Syria will figure in India- Iran talks.

However, it’s important to note that when the question was of India’s stand on an independent international issue (which here means not involving India directly), both the Hindi and the English press were not willing to give the story its due display. The story was tucked into the international pages of the dailies. The Prime Minister articulated India’s stand on the Syria crisis in his address to the inaugural session of the summit. Dainik Bhaskar reported it with the headline, Syria me na ho bahari hashtakshep-- There should be no external interference in Syria(page 15, national edition, 31.08.2012). Dainik Jagran also had a similar headline on its international page (page 7, national edition) on the same day: Syria me bahari hashtakshep ke khilaf Manmohan--Manmohan against external interference in Syria. But, to its credit, giving space to critical reflection on this issue, Dainik Jagran published an insightful opinion piece (a translated one) by Harsh V. Pant, foreign policy scholar based in King’s College, London, (Kutniti ka Syriai morcha--The Syrian Front of Diplomacy, Dainik Jagran, 01.09.2012).

Editorial comment

Not all the major Hindi dailies or all the major English dailies carried editorial comment on the NAM summit and the Prime Minister’s engagements there. However, both Jansatta and The Indian Express had editorially opined that much could not be expected for India from the Tehran summit. Dissecting the possibilities of an Indo-Iran engagement in the summit, The Indian Express commented: “Until Iran is more at peace with itself and with its region and beyond, the possibilities for a productive cooperation between Delhi and Tehran will remain limited” (Small Talk, The Indian Express, 31.08.2012).

Jansatta also echoes this view of limiting the expectations, as its edit (Tehran ki raah--Tehran’s Path, 31.08.2012) ends with the rhetorical question: Tehran sammelan ke khaate me uplabdhi ke naam par kya hoga? (What achievement will be credited to Tehran summit?)

Talking of divergence, the defence of NAM’s relevance in an editorial in The Hindu (Proof of Life, 03.09.2012) runs counter to what Dainik Bhaskar commented in its edit, Nirguttaa ke manch par--On the Non-Alignment Platform (01.09.2012).

The Hindu is of the view that “If the United States was hoping the meet would lay bare the isolation of Iran, end in a quarrel over Syria, and expose NAM as an irrelevance, it must have been disappointed”. Dainik Bhaskar was not willing to certify the relevance of NAM, as its edit remarked: Sit yudh ki baad ki duniya me ASEAN,BRICS, Shanghai Sahyog Parishad,G-20 jaise aarthik taakat avam saajha rannitik samajh ke aadhar par bane samooh chizon ko adhik prabhavit kar rahe hain.Chuki nirgut andolan apna aisa koi sandarbh banana me nakaam hai, isliye ye mahaj baatcheet ka hi manch rah gaya hai (In the post-cold war world, economic powers and groups, which have been formed on the basis of joint strategic understanding , like ASEAN, BRICS, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and G-20, are influencing the things. As Non Aligned Movement has failed in building such a context for itself, it has been reduced to a platform for talks only).

One of the challenges for contemporary international reporting and commentary is to identify and critically reflect on the undercurrents shaping international politics and diplomacy. Indian media in general, and Hindi press in particular, have sometimes mixed and sometimes dismal record on this count. The coverage and commentary on the recent NAM summit in the Hindi print space is a case of foreign policy analysts crawling out of woodwork to make a point or two. Such an engagement with the world needs to be made more rigorous and regular in Hindi papers and, for that matter, in all sections of the Indian press (including the English one). After all, there is a world to know.