You don`t say!
Darius Nakhoonwala
Last week was one of those weeks. There was, it seems, no big event to write about, other than the shooting of Pramod Mahajan. But not a single newspaper, barring the Business Standard--yes, not even the Pioneer-- thought it fit to comment on what this meant for the BJP.
So they fell back on the tried and tested ploy. They wrote on international topics, secure in the knowledge that you don`t really have to say anything knowledgeable, only sound ponderous and use euphemisms.
What really gave the game away about how desperate the situation was were the edits on Chernobyl in the Hindustan Times and on the release of the film Mughal-e-Azam in Pakistan . That was really scraping the bottom of the barrel.
In the event The Hindu wrote 8 edits on international topics. The Pioneer wrote 4. The Hindustan Times wrote 5. The Deccan Herald wrote 4. The Indian Express wrote 3, including the one on Mughal-e-Azam. That is 24 edits out of 68 or just under a third, which must be a record.
But even more interesting was that Telegraph wrote none at all, because it wrote five out the total 10 on the elections in West Bengal. No one can accuse it of getting its priorities wrong. The Hindu, conversely, has been pretending that there are no elections in Tamil Nadu.
The topics covered were China , Egypt, Nepal , Iraq, Iran, Italy, Sri Lanka, and hold your breath, Uzbekistan where the Prime Minister had stopped over on his way back from Germany. But no one wrote on his German visit, not even the Business Standard which might have wondered what the poor dear was doing in what was, at the end, a trade fair.
The sheer inanity of the edits was also quite spectacular. On Sri Lanka there was some domain knowledge but on much of the rest it was just the usual off-the-cuff stuff that the Indian reader - are there any for edits? - has to put up with.
I have said this before, perhaps, but I feel it must be said again: why do Indian newspapers not show the same degree of independent and mature opinion on foreign subjects as they do on domestic issues?
On Sri Lanka , for example, there everyone was agreed that the LTTE was the problem, which is the standard MEA view. But the reader needs some background and that was inadequate.
On Nepal also there wasn`t much criticism of the way the government had bungled. Instead, everyone was singing praises for the restoration of democracy. No one asked if this was in India `s interest.
The Hindu on Uzbekistan was its pallid best and the Hindustan Times on Chernobyl simply repeated the old nostrums. The Deccan Herald on US-China relations read like a USIS handout.
So here`s a question that Indian newspapers, now that India is beginning to acquire regional, if not global, interests, need to answer: are they going to treat the world as a residual subject or are they going to pay a bit more attention to it in terms of manpower and expertise?
Contact: Darius.Nakhoonwala@gmail.com