THEY both would feel at home in Delhi. She a firebrand lawyer activist from Pakistan whose stark views on the deplorable state of politics and human rights abuse in her country were matched by effortless attention and unmistakable adulation she got from the national media in the Indian capital; he a former gun toting militant who stoically bore the scars of his torture from years in Kashmiri jails and who had now turned to Gandhian pacifism of non-violent agitation for Kashmiri rights to reach out to a larger chunk of sympathisers among liberal Indians.

Then they made a small miscalculation about the degree of interest they could muster in Delhi and that became eye-openers for both and for their followers alike. Asma Jahangir in her avatar as UN Rapporteur for Religious Freedoms and Belief summoned a press conference at the end of an 18-day rare tour of India’s hotspots as defined by her mandate. She had addressed a rivetted audience at the Jamia Milia Islamia’s prestigious Edward Said Hall only days before her UN mission began. At that time she had blasted the army dictatorship in Pakistan and praised the lawyers’ movement to the skies. The audience gave thunderous applause.

Naturally, she must have thought, the Indian media, which had clung to her every word of the damning criticism of Pakistan, would pay heed also to what she now had to say about this country as UN envoy. But that was not to be. Her friends in TV and newspapers here seemed to have little or no interest in whatever she had to say about the state of religious freedoms in their country.

Ms Jehangir was evidently shocked when she discovered the next day that the media had all but blacked out her press conference, save her plea against the planned execution of alleged Indian spy Sarbjit Singh that was really not part of her press conference. There was not a word on her favourite TV channels about what she had learnt from her recent visits to Kashmir, Orissa and Gujarat among some of the hotspots where she scanned her interlocutors on the burning issues of communalism and religious freedoms. So what was the problem?

The problem is two-fold and not new. The Indian mediascape has dramatically changed in the past 15 years. Privatisation and deregulation have resulted in increased entertainment-driven rather than public service oriented news. Indian journalists encounter serious ethical issues but media ethics is not a topic being widely discussed in Indian newsrooms and TV stations. Marketing pressures, the tabloidisation of news, and management and economic pressures are affecting issues such as accountability, independence, and conflict of interests. If TV is driven by TRP ratings, newspapers tend to go by similar business interests that often have their nerve-ends in a minister’s office or some other powerful zone of influence peddling.

At the same time the so-called mainstream media is neatly aligned with what we know in common parlance as “state interests”, something that Ms Jahangir and Mr Malik would do well to understand. It is no gainsaying that since 1948 India has resisted UN approaches in what it calls its internal affairs. The national media have never questioned the stance. If anything there is all round endorsement of the “hard-line” on issues such as Kashmir. In a similar vein perhaps I was witness (or party) to a most bizarre act of the media’s “nationalist zeal” that some of us displayed on February 27, 2002. The Godhra tragedy had occurred that morning. Everyone was apprehensive of the arriving consequences. Just then Prime Minister Vajpayee was bidding farewell to President Karzai of Afghanistan with a joint declaration to be followed by a customary question-answer session, a step short of a full-scope pres conference.

It was then that some of the journalists at the ceremony decided that we would not discuss the “embarrassing issue” of Godhra with the prime minister in a foreigner’s presence. So we contrived, with the PM’s media adviser Ashok Tandon, to meet Mr Vajpayee separately after Mr Karzai had boarded his car. “Sir, we didn’t want to discuss the Godhra issue during the bilateral talks, but we would like you to make a statement on the matter to calm down the frayed tempers in Gujarat.”

Can you imagine the press assuming the role of government PR. Mr Vajpayee for his part made a tame appeal for peace and then headed home to prepare for the next day’s national budget speech. The rest is history. I doubt if there is a parallel to the pusillanimity of the press I was privy to that day, all in the name of some higher national cause.

The complete self-absorption of the Indian media with its image as the guardian of national interests saw the exaggerated tripe dished out about the Battle of Longewala in the war with Pakistan in 1971. We also witnessed amazingly unbridled jingoism from “some of our best” during the Kargil standoff. The case of a TV journalist reporting “live” from the army bunkers in the frontlines is far too well known to be recalled. The fact that the journalist’s zeal helped the Pakistanis locate the transmitter and direct their missiles at the bunker with precision is another aspect of the story. A third offshoot of the same story is that the kind of reporting we saw in a moment of nationalist fervour in Kargil was to subsequently fuel the Gujarat fires where the enemy image of Pakistanis was easily superimposed on Muslim minorities. It was curious that the same set of reporters of Kargil’s jingoism were then out in Gujarat to save the day for Indian secularism.

For those who cannot see the link between the nationalist zeal in Kargil and religious chauvinism in Gujarat Asma Jahangir’s extremely sensitive survey of facts concerning religious freedoms and belief in India would not amount to much. Such people cannot see the fallout of a complete drought in the Barcelona Olympics in the summer of 1992 when India did not get even a bronze medal with the disaster that followed in Ayodhya on Dec 6 that year. (And now that our hockey team has failed to even qualify for the Beijing Games, it’s only reasonable to keep our fingers crossed for what the future may hold.)

But national interest is a variable ideal. Is it national interest, really, that Indian dailies and TV channels are swamped with images of Tibetans protesting China’s crackdown against Buddhist monks in Lhasa?

Is something happening in Tibet that is not happening also in Jammu and Kashmir or in Manipur? I hear the Americans have taken the Kashmir issue “off the burner” quite possibly for all time to come though in their case you can never tell. It is the same folks who have put the Tibetan issue on the front burner, so to speak, ahead of the Olympics and we all know the reasons why. So what is in it for India? Grandstanding on political morality, are we?

This brings me to Yasin Malik’s sparsely attended photo exhibition and film show in Delhi last week about his march through myriad violence-wracked villages of Jammu and Kashmir. How many Indian journalists have been there? Malik travelled to over 8000 and he is on the wrong side of the armed militants and of the Indian security forces. Therefore the risk to his life was twice as much as the fear that has stalked everyone in Kashmir since 1990. Malik journeyed through the heartland of Kashmir for 114 days from May last year.

There were more protesters who came out to meet him seeking a peaceful conclusion of their ordeal than the Dalai Lama can gather in Delhi, Bangalore or Dharmashala. Some well-known Indian intellectuals and activists visited Malik’s exhibition but there was not a word in the media on an issue that truly has been a part of India’s core national interest. We love Pakistanis and Kashmiris who are critical of their leaders and the state of affairs in their patch but they dare not turn their ire against us even if they mean well. This is the point to ponder not just for Asma Jahangir and Yasin Malik but also for those who want to fortify secular democracy in India and build it from scratch in Pakistan.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com.