BIG SCAM, BUT WHAT'S THE STORY?
and/or www.mantra.com/jai
By Udayan Namboodiri
Op-Ed
The Pioneer
Saturday, April 24, 2010
'Relevations' notwithstanding, crowds thronged at IPL fixtures. After
19 years of neo-liberal reforms scams are déjà vu. In other news,
Dalit killings continue, BPL population touches 34 per cent and an
Arundhati Roy interview enjoys six reruns....
Media interest and public interest are two different things. In
classrooms on serious journalism, an episode out of Japan is often
upheld to illustrate this divide. In mid-1988, it seemed that nothing
was more important to the people of Japan than knowing in advance who
President Ronald Reagan would name as America's next Ambassador to
their country. Newspapers ran banner headlines predicting Mr X's
possibilities over Mr Y's and TV channels announced prizes for
anybody who could make the right guess. Day in and day out, there
were 'breaking news' prompted by the outgoing Ambassador being
spotted at a party or one of the possible 'winners' seen outside a
Japanese restaurant in New York. One big newspaper (and mind,
Japanese newspapers come very big) reportedly hired an agency in
Washington to tap the telephones of State Department officials, and
its competitor paid another guy to snoop on him to uphold 'ethics' in
journalism.
The Japanese media's mindset was locked up in the post-World War II
situation when an American Ambassador, as the political emissary of
the US President, i.e. the chief of the victorious power, had de
facto supremacy over Japan's King and Prime Minister. But, over the
years, as Japan regained its economic clout and the task of defanging
its military class was completed, the aplomb that surrounded the post
of the US Ambassador got eroded and before long the Americans
themselves lost all use for ritual reiteration of a forgotten agenda.
As for the Japanese, it was their turn to take over American business
corporations, car markets and Hollywood. Yet, every three or four
years, the Tokyo media went berserk over the new viceroy. The hapless
newspaper reading and TV viewing public had no choice but suffer the
moronic competition.
The explosion of media interest over the so-called "IPLGate", which
consumers are forced to recognise as a matter of life and death for
India (the politicians said so and wasn't Parliament 'rocked'?),
reminded me of this anecdote which was related to me while visiting a
US university some years back. The backdrop to this was Shashi
Tharoor's overstress on the point that an 'attractive woman' (later
the lady herself humbly admitted to being one in a Tehelka interview)
could be the world's greatest management guru. The public was
entitled to be told of the details of the illegal 'sweat equity' (or
was it 'sweet equity'?) to the minister's fiancée and left to make
its own deductions. But, the handle that the media gave itself on the
entire IPL empire was not about investigative journalism or even
truth crusade - it was about misplaced morality.
I asked my teenaged son, the IPL circus' real target, "How can you
watch a game that is so tainted....maybe it's fixed." He coolly shot
back "it's like WWF -- dirty but entertaining." At that moment I was
hit by a realisation: what kind of Indians are we
rearing ? This is the generation born in the 1990s, wholly shaped by
the neoliberal ethos which holds that everything, including morality,
strikes its own market-dictated level. In my time, children were
artless and unpolluted by too many realities; we rejoiced in the
simple delights of life. Not these kids.
The media laments the corruption of cricket, indeed the duping of
millions, but bark up the wrong tree. "IPLGate" is only the symptom
of a cancer, which is the alien economic system which successive
governments, beginning with Narasimha Rao-Manmohan Singh in 1991,
have thrust on the Indian milieu. An IPL match is the embodiment of
Mammom worship, the rape of the spiritual ethos of India which had
once welcomed a gentle, dignified game like cricket. I may be
sounding a bit like a yoga guru here, but slavish submission to the
greed of a few, as the World Bank-led consensus would like us Indians
to do, is definitely more treasonable than recalling the socialist
emphasis in the Preamble to the Constitution of India. We stress on
'secularism' because it is politically expedient, but bury
'socialism', the other hallmark of the Indian State, because it's
convenient to a few.
That's the story we miss. The whole gamut of issues that IPLGate has
its origins in a flawed economic doctrine which was supplanted on
India after four-and-a-half decades of phoney socialism failed to
produce results. Since 1991, we have seen the media extend
unquestioned approval to any new venture and go to any extent to
cheer 'success', whether or not earned legitimately. Harshad Mehta,
whose memory hits me every time I hear the words "Lalit Modi", was
originally projected by Business India, Business World and the rest
of the business press as a messiah for the investing community until
the truth came out - accidentally. The MS Shoes scam, Damania
Airways, Bailadila iron ore, Sankhya Vahini, right down to the SEZs
now fast dotting the landscape, were beneficiaries of drugged
silence. The media's antenna should have been up right in the early
days of the IPL journey. Given the memory of the unseemly tango
between big money and cricketers in the turn of the 1990s, somebody
should have taken the trouble of visiting the office of the Registrar
of Companies to check the antecedents of the entities that had
brought so much money to the table. But nobody did.
Since Tharoor's resignation on Sunday night the whole focus has
changed to Lalit Modi, BCCI and their respective shenanigans.
Politicians and tax bureaucrats are merrily planting stories, even
transcripts of tapped phone calls, which are regurgitated by the
hour. Lo and behold, the morning newspaper reads like the script read
out by the Times Now anchor on "NewsHour" the previous night. Much
the same tamasha over the ITC scandal of 1996, when top bosses of
that company were 'interrogated' by Enforcement Branch officials
round-the-clock, even placed under police custody for weeks on end,
but to produce other than a lot of news bytes which added up to
nothing. Quite frankly, media houses in India lack skilled personnel
to investigate economic crimes of the scale allegedly carried out by
Lalit Modi or BCCI or, as some channels say, both. Our journos excel
in being receptacles for interest groups.
Meanwhile, the Planning Commission has been forced to accept that 37
per cent of Indians, i.e. 430 million people, are currently living
below the poverty line. There were two cases of heinous assaults on
Dalit villagers this week. The media's apathy to this has bred a
suprising, new market for the wisdom espoused by Arundhati Roy, the
writer who is not embarrassed to articulate the agenda of the
Maoists. Now, we have the same media which unabashedly campaigns for
the Washington Consensus making money out of her interviews and
articles. Why, simply because she now has a market where she isn't
supposed to have. Now that's a case of convergence of media and
public interest.
- The writer is Senior Editor, The Pioneer
Comments so far:
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Big Scam By Kumar on 4/24/2010
Thanks for the article, which reflects the thoughts of some of us
Indians who sadly follow the recently accelerated degeneration of
ethos, sense of pride, spirit of nationalism and character of
Indians. Faulty and self-serving policies of our post-independance
leaders, in conjunction with vested interest groups and media,
created a country now where corruption, extreme form of materialism
and copycats of decadent aspects of Western culture thrive.
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Media shenanigana By Arun Kumar on 4/24/2010
They are all the same. Times Now, Cnn-IBN, Ndtv. The three so called
political/managing editors are from the same stock, originally from
Mr Roy's stables and none of them is a thorough breed. All upstarts
lacking substance and konwledge and going for cheap yellow
journalism, with the excuse that the viewers want it. The latter have
no choice as not a single channel is the exception.
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"what kind of Indians are we rearing?" By Traditional parent on
4/24/2010
What kind of Indian has he reared, in his own house, his own son?? -
why now wring his hands and moan about it?
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IPL a symptom By Atma Gandhi on 4/24/2010
Udayan is right. IPL mess up is only symptom. It reflects wrong
economic system and slavish thinking of elite, who are unable to
understand historical sufferings of a liberal civilisation due to
selfishness of of a few, which exploited and excluded majority, who
did not & could not support or defend when required. This was root
cause of continuous defeat at the hands of Invaders and resultant
slavery.
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Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
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