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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Is there a ban on reporting bad news from India? by Andrew Buncombe

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 don’t 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 it’s an investment destination. So you don’t hear about it. But there is an insurrection, and it’s not just a Maoist insurrection. Everywhere in the country, people are fighting.”

Mr Moss’s 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 don’t believe it’s corrupt.”

I’ve been thinking about what both of them said, and discussing the matter with some colleagues based in India. I’ve never received a “no bad news” order from London and all my colleagues 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. 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. This shift 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 I’ve been here, I’ve 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 people’s 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 India’s image, and it’s 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 perhaps one or two exceptions, it must be said, there is little interference from the Indian authorities.

I emailed Ms Roy, who I 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 we’re 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 simply off the map.