Since the Janata government is as keen as its predecessor to maintain and develop good relations with other third world countries, it is in a sense not surprising that it is equally keen to promote the non-aligned pool for dissemination of “news” and that it should be trying to “persuade” the Press Trust of India, one of the national news agencies, to distribute the so-called service. But in another sense it is. For in view of the circumstances in which the Janata was born it was not unreasonable to expect that its leadership would be aware of the central purpose behind the move to establish the pool – to “prettify” dictatorial regimes – and would wish to wash its hand off this enterprise.
But it has done nothing or the kind. It has conveniently ignored the fact that most of the third world countries are ruled by dictators who cannot in the nature of things permit the free flow of information and that the so-called news agencies in most of these countries are wholly government-controlled and cannot be expected to provide anything other than official propaganda. Perhaps it is being guided by expediency, perhaps by lack of full awareness of what is at stake. But whatever the reason for its acting the way it is, it may be useful to underline some unpleasant facts.
DIFFICULT
To mention just a few of these, it is extremely difficult for correspondents belonging to one “friendly” non-aligned country to function in another. They are expected to toe the official line all the time. Non-aligned governments are far more accommodating and respectful towards Western correspondents. The position is so bad that while hardly any India correspondent, for instance, in most of these capitals can ever expect an interview with the heads of government, Western correspondents have free access to them. The reason is simple. All non-aligned governments want a good press in the West and they do not care much about what is written about them in the third world press.
It is, of course, true that it is far costlier for an Indian newspaper to maintain a correspondent in any West Asian capital than, say, in London and that it will be useful to find a way out of this difficulty. But cost is not the only inhibiting factor. One can easily name capital after capital where it is just not possible for an honest correspondent to function. And any Indian editor who has ever posted correspondents in any country under a dictatorial regime will bear testimony to the fact that our own ministry of external affairs has at least in the past regarded it its duty to convey complaints from the other government to him and to “persuade” him to ask his correspondent to “heed” the national interest, that is to send reports which at least do not annoy the government of the host country. Not an easy task sending such reports!
Mr Mohammed Yunus, Mrs Gandhi’s special envoy, in the previous set-up was candid. He did not expect the gentlemen whom he wanted to post as representatives of Samachar abroad to send reasonably objective reports from those countries. He wanted them to promote India’s image – they were to be better paid than ambassadors, so at least he confided to his confidantes, which means that they were supposed to entertain on the same scale as Western correspondent can and do – and perhaps send confidential reports to him or some official agency so that the government did not have to depend solely on the assessment of its ambassadors. He was following the CIA’s example, only even more crudely.
Apparently this grandiose and costly scheme has been shelved by the Janata government. But what survives is bad enough. We are now expected to swallow unadulterated propaganda provided by foreign governments masquerading as news agencies.
RELEVANT
Several other relevant points have hardly figured in the discussion on the non-aligned pool. Hardly any participant in the debate has, for instance, taken note of the well known twin facts that most newspapers in any country are not interested in foreign news because their readers do not care about what happens in faraway lands and that the coverage of developments abroad even in highly respected newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post in the United States, The Times, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph in Britain and Le Monde in France is inevitably determined to a substantial degree by the interests, involvement and old associations of those countries.
Thus all these newspapers pay far greater attention to developments in oil-rich West Asia than, say, to South Asia which does not possess any similarly valuable raw material. Le Monde has as a rule provided better coverage of developments in former French-ruled parts of Africa than the other newspapers mentioned above. The interest of all of them in China is bound to grow as Peking places orders for machinery and military hardware worth billions of dollars in their countries. In our own case, we are bound to devote far more space to Pakistan and Bangladesh than to the whole of Africa and even West Asia if only we could send our correspondents to Rawalpindi and Dacca and they could function with a reasonable degree of freedom there.
It may hurt our ego to admit that our interest in foreign affairs has been and remains superficial. But it is a fact. Let me cite a piece of evidence which anyone can easily check. The national Defence College in New Delhi, which arranges lectures on various countries as part of its study of the international security environment, is hard put to it to find someone who can speak with any degree of sophistication on the Soviet economy, for instance. It has had to depend on the same one or two individuals year after year for its lecture on the US political system. And the college, it may be mentioned, is free to draw on officials in the Union government which means that there is not much of expertise there either. While it will clearly be wrong to exonerate the academic community, especially those in it who are paid to specialise in foreign affairs, this state of affairs is the result of a variety of factors which should not be ignored. We are an insular people. We are not sufficiently curious about other peoples. Our own country is large and complex enough to engage our interests and energies. For a paper in New Delhi to report developments in Tamil Nadu involves the same kind of effort as for a British paper to report on Germany. We have not been an imperial power and we do not have the capacity to influence significantly the course of events even in the adjoining Persian Gulf.
The last point is important because human beings respond to felt needs. The United States had hardly any worthwhile expertise on Asia and Africa when it suddenly emerged as the leading power at the end of World War II and the Russians have only recently begun to show awareness of the complexities of the tribal culture and divisions in Africa. Leading newspapers in India try in their own way to promote knowledge of world affairs and they can perhaps do a little more but not very much more because their coverage is determined by the interests, expectations and demands of their readers.
To take up another aspect of the issue, it is understandable that some of us should be concerned over the “negative” image which some Western newspapers and magazines project of our country.
But it is not at all clear how the non-aligned pool can possibly help tackle this problem. For, one must be naive to believe that it is for want of information that some journals indulge in sensationalism and distortion. Anyone who knows anything about journalism must know that some journals depend on sensationalism for their circulation and survival and that they distort developments in their own countries as much as they do developments elsewhere. Instances can easily be cited from within this country.
COVERAGE
It is also extraordinary that anyone in India should complain about the inadequacy of the coverage of this country in the Western media. That is their business and not ours. If they wish to become as ignorant about us as we are generally about them, they are as free to do so as we. But as it happens, the Western world manages to possess enormous expertise about us and other third world countries so much so that we ourselves have to depend on it. This expertise is, of course, reflected not so much in their newspapers as in their scholarly and university journals and books which doubtless few among the promoters of the non-aligned pool have ever cared to read.
Finally, Mrs Gandhi was angry with the Western media not so much because their coverage of India was inadequate as because it was not flattering to her and her regime. She was ambivalent in her attitude towards them and so are many of us, not just towards the Western media but towards the West itself. We wish to imitate it and run it down at the same time. Mrs Gandhi faced an additional problem. She was confident that she could have sold her regime to Western governments on the strength of economic cooperation with them if the Western media were not there to spoil her image. Surely, the Janata leadership faces no such problem. Why, then, is it allowing itself to be stuck with an instrument she had fashioned with like-minded individuals elsewhere for that specific purpose?
The Times of India, 18 October 1978