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Is there a ban on reporting bad news from India?
By Andrew Buncombe
The Foreign Desk
Wednesday, 22 June 2011 at 6:41 am
It was the writer and activist Arundhati Roy who set foreign journalists in India busily chattering recently. In an interview with Stephen Moss in the Guardian, Ms Roy was discussing the Maoist and Adavasi resistance to encroachment on tribal lands. Mr Moss, asked her why, we in the West dont hear about these mini-wars?. Ms Roy replied: I have been told quite openly by several correspondents of international newspapers, that they have instructions No negative news from India because its an investment destination. So you dont hear about it. But there is an insurrection, and its not just a Maoist insurrection. Everywhere in the country, people are fighting.
Mr Mosss response was: I find the suggestion that such an injunction exists or that self-respecting journalists would accept it ridiculous. Foreign reporting of India might well be lazy or myopic, [Thanks Stephen, that's very decent of you.] but I dont believe its corrupt.
Ive been thinking about what both of them said, and discussing the matter with some colleagues based in India. Ive never received a no bad news order from London and the colleagues I spoke with insisted that neither had they. Several things struck me:
In the last decade or so India has certainly been successful in re-branding its international image. Where once it was seen as a hopeless, overwhelmingly poor country, there has instead been focus on a newly aspirational middle-class and economic progress, the new Shining India. As a result, there are fewer stories about malnutrition (which still haunts huge numbers of Indians) but more about new airlines, coffee shops, call centres, the World Is Flat, eight per cent growth and the attendant changing structure of society, especially in urban India. Though things have probably shifted too much, the change in focus is understandable enough; the media is always looking for something new, something different, to report on. I also think that in India as elsewhere in the world the priorities of Western corporations sometimes find their way into the news agenda; every month or so, some article will ask when India will finally allow the likes of Wal-Mart and Tesco to operate here.
At the same time, does this stop bad news about India being broadcast or published? In the time Ive been here, Ive written about insurgencies, caste, poverty, farmer suicides, religious violence, killings in Kashmir, Hindu terror cells, corruption (a number of times), honour killings, slums, land battles and homelessness. In the last 18 months, The Independent has published three substantial pieces on the Maoists. My colleagues have done the same, travelling to Nyamgiri to write about the tribal peoples fight against mining company Vedanta, to the Maoist infested areas of Chhattisgarh and West Bengal, to Srinagar and Bihar, or working in Delhi where they highlighted the corruption and mis-management surrounding the Commonweath Games or else illegal child labour involved in the textile industry.
None of these issues could be considered positive for Indias image, and its true they are controversial. Invariably, articles that focus on such issues will be met by a barrage of condemnation on the web, usually from upper middle-class Indians who choose to believe the country has moved on from such things or else those living overseas. With some ugly and unhealthy exceptions, it must be said there is usually little interference from the Indian authorities.
I emailed Ms Roy, who I respect and admire even if I believe her analysis on some key issues is in need of some nuance, to ask if she had been misquoted and, if not, whether she could reveal the individuals labouring under the no bad news directive. She replied to say she had indeed been quoted correctly in the Guardian but that the correspondents she referred to had spoken to her confidentially. She said there had been two people who had told her this, which is a little different to several as she initially remarked.
Perhaps Mr Moss bears some of the blame for his question. Knowing that he was interviewing a leading Indian social activist, he might have spent a little more time researching the issues she has been writing about. He could have done little better than reading his own paper. In 2006, its correspondent spent several days travelling with the Maoists for a lengthy feature, while more recently, the paper has reported from the insurgent heartlands of West Bengal.
Perhaps the truth is that were all just too busy, or too lazy, to keep up with the news of any particular place, unless we make a conscious effort to do so. I chuckle, thinking that before moving to India four years ago, I had never heard of Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan (left). It now seems inconceivable that the man whose beaming face and bouffant hair greet me every day, from the Page 3 gossip stories to virtually every other television advert, was ever off the map.
Is there a ban on reporting bad news from India? | Andrew Buncombe | Independent Editor's choice Blogs
