Dear Ms. Barkha,
Sub: Barkha Dutt – Arnab Goswami & the stuff in between.
It was interesting to read your post regarding your recent standoff with Arnab Goswami. I am not as good an ‘English man’ as ‘English women’ you are for my English is poor but I am taking this liberty of writing an open letter to you under the ‘right to write freely’ . However there is one point from your post that struck me.
This one I quote directly from your post:
“This is about our fundamental right to report freely and honestly without being conveniently misrepresented as terror sympathizers or enemies of the Indian Army”.
And herein lies the rub.
What is it, Barkha, that today you & many more of your ilk are not considered to be a group of unbiased reporters / commentators / anchors of the media by a vast number of Indians?
Keep Arnab Goswami aside for a moment.
It is because your stories on militancy, militants & the role of security forces operating under the most difficult & trying circumstances is seen to be laced with an ideology & narrative that brinks on anti-Indianism & pro subversion. This is because you are seen & heard narrating only one side of the story. And when you talk of the ‘other side’ you again interpret the ‘others’ point of view conveniently to fan your own perceptions, agenda & ideology. Here you take up the role of a judge, lawyer & litigant & close the programme accordingly. Many a times keen watchers of your shows have noticed that you brusquely cut out a person who tries to narrate a story that is not in line with your own line of thinking or out of sync with ‘editorial policy’ of your TV channel. No problems on that either!!
The other part is about your narrative when it comes to atrocities on members of different communities in the country. I for one am against atrocities against anyone irrespective of his or her religion, caste, culture, sex, nationality or belief. I am against atrocities of every kind be they by the state / non-state actors, individuals or communities. Sight of children with pellets in their face & bodies in Kashmir are very uncomfortable for any human & especially for me as I lived substantial part of my life among them & these pictures make my soul churn for them. I can’t figure out as how to reach out to them or to their kith & kin & console them. This is the tragedy of Kashmir & such things happen in cycles & quite often, unfortunately.
I do not even know how to reach out to the security forces either whose personnel brave it day in & day out to keep this country safe. These people who are posted in Kashmir could be from “Punjab, Sindh, Gujrat, Marathwada, Dravid, Utkal, Banga, Vindhya ranges, Himachal & from the villages & cities on the banks of Yamuna & Ganga & from states that are located on the shores of the ocean”. They could be natives of J&K & North East too. They are there for no fault of theirs. They, their families & friends & all of us are suffering today because of non-foresighted decisions of the Indian leadership in 1947. Jinnah knew his mind & his goal & he achieved it without any major hiccups.
Though I did not have the ‘good fortune’ of studying at the Saint Stephens College, Delhi but I studied in one of the equally prestigious Christian Missionary Schools in Srinagar where I picked up the fundamental principles of equality & fraternity & imbibed the values of honesty, fair play & forthrightness. The foundation that was laid in this school turned me to be an “IN ALL THINGS BE MEN” individual & my basic tenet was & shall always remain to respect all humans irrespective of what denomination of the society they came from & who they were.
But even for a person like me who watched you & heard you on TV over so many years a feeling creeps in that your reporting of events is largely one sided & not fair.
My take, Barkha, is that whenever there are atrocities on Muslims or women or whosoever, report it honestly by all means but do not close your eyes when atrocities are committed on Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsis & all other denominations who do not have the tact & wherewithal to handle you & the media you promote. When atrocities are committed in BJP ruled states on Muslims or ‘free thinkers’, liberals, believers or non-believers or anyone else of the like, report them honestly & without fear & hold as many ‘Buck Stops Here’ as possible but do the same when such acts are committed in states that are not ruled by BJP & its allies. If atrocities are committed against Muslims in any part of the country report them with whatever force that is available with you, but do not turn your eyes & TV cameras other way when same is happening with others. Atrocities on minority community or on majority community are abhor-able irrespective of their political or religious beliefs. To say that atrocities are not committed on majority community by people who matter is the biggest lie perpetuated by the media. Majority also suffers at the hands of the minority many a times & it goes unreported or not adequately reported. Not reporting of these issues is not fair play on the part of media
These are the honest feelings of a person who is a ‘common man’ & who has grown old seeing you on TV since the day you started your career in the media & at times watched you with a lot of admiration.
Smriti Irani was not off the mark when she asked of you in her interview to you in Amethi that why was the case of the rape victim of Kerala not raised with same intensity by you as you normally would have done had this incident happened in a BJP ruled state. And remember this young woman who died after the atrocious incident was from the most down trodden background & lived on the poorest of the poor conditions on the fringes of the society. Was she forgotten because reporting & orchestrating of the incident was not politically expedient & correct to you or your ‘well-wishers’ at that point in time.
Staying with Smiriti Irani. You did not answer her question directly when she asked you why the chopping off of the hands of the RSS worker in Kerala was not taken up seriously by media. RSS workers are Indians too though they may be thinking differently from you on many issues that relate to the philosophy & idea of India. How do you justify spending hours of your prime time deliberating on thugs & thieves of India & about lost buffaloes, that too repeatedly, but you do not have time to mention atrocities committed on an Indian with the ideology of whom you are not comfortable.
Recently Daya Shankar Singh abused Ms. Mayawati in the filthiest of languages for which he should of course be punished severely & brought to book. As a human being I felt ashamed of what he said. There was outcry & commotion & rightly so in the media & otherwise. In the Parliament Arun Jaitly had to ask Ms. Mayawati for pardon & forgiveness. However when the BSP leaders abused the wife & daughter of Daya Shankar Singh in the most inappropriate & shameful language did you stand up for the aggrieved women? Neither you (who calls herself a champion of women liberties, their rights & feminist) nor your media took any notice of such a shameful outburst by the BSP representative. Do you remember how you were questioning Smiriti Irani about her ‘failure’ to stand up for women when they were in distress or were being trolled? Where was your activism for these two hapless women. What was their fault if Daya Shankar Singh used filthy language?
You have covered Kashmir all your professional life & Kashmir has bestowed you with name, fame & prestige. May God bless you with more of name, fame & prestige. But have you never come across clusters of dilapidated houses, many of them turning into a heap, in village after village & town after town that were abandoned by Kashmiri Pandits during those tumults times of 1989/90 & thereafter. Have you never noticed their crumbling façade & pulled out doors & windows through which have grown trees & plants of various varieties & hues. Have you never thought of the fact that once upon a time they must have been inhabited by happy, merry & content living human beings? Have you never imagined that once upon a time they must have been throbbing households inhabited by families, elderly people, men & women & laughing & giggling children? Have you never come across crumbling door frames of these houses on the sidewalls of which are prints of faded palm marks of the bride & the bridegroom with flowery sketches, usually in white colour, gaily announcing ‘Ramesh weds Nancy’ or ‘Ashok weds Sarla’ with a WELCOME sign on top.
Did you ever ask yourself a question as to where these people have gone? Did you ever care to listen to the footsteps of the people on the crumbling & stinking staircases of these damaged & sometimes half burnt houses who must have enjoyed their springs, summers, autumn & winters in these places. People who must have shared their joys & sorrows together in these houses.
Did you ever ‘honestly & fearlessly’ prepare a TV programme exploring as to what happened to this proud & ancient ethnic community that vanished from the tracts of the Valley so suddenly. You certainly did some programmes on these unfortunate people but they were so shabbily made that it was clearly evident that they carried your biased mindset. You also tried to put Muslims against Kashmiri Pandits subtly but surely through your twisted & skewed narration & logic. The programmes were made shabbily, not because of your incompetence, but because you did not put in your heart & soul in them as you do for other programmes where you use intensely flamboyant part of your personality to make them real life experiences. These programmes were, to say the least, lip service / fill in the blanks & nothing else.
Having lived in Delhi for last few years I tried to make sure that I should witness the rallies that are so frequently held in Delhi on one issue or the other.This was my way of understanding India more closely. I attended AAP rallies (where my purse was pick pocketed), Anna Hazare rallies, earlier on, from which were born Kejriwal, Sisodia, Gen. V.K.Singh & Kiran Bedi (later two in their political ‘avtar’). I also witnessed the rally by Anupam Kher against people who thought that tolerance was their copy right. The experience about the media in this rally was startling. It seemed that the main stream English media had already made up their mind that they would prick holes in the sails of Anupam Kher’s rally. They had no intention of covering the rally but were engaged in infuriating the participants by their irrelevant & out of place & sometimes out of mind questions. When some of the participants complained about the migration from the Valley they were told that there was nothing so dangerous happening in the Valley (in 1989/90) that could have prompted them to flee. When the participants persisted with their narration they were told that we know it better than you do. The participants protested & tried to reason with the reporters that it is they who had lost their home & hearth & how come these 20 some age reporters are telling them that they know more than what the sufferers do. Instead of listening to them (forget sympathizing) the journalists were in fact negating what these people had gone through. Here the problem started & turned to full blown discussion with tempers rising on both the sides. By the time I reached home there was a fully blown up debate on TV channels about how the participants of Anupam Kher’s rally had abused & harassed the journalists. Come on guys & then you say you are holy cows!!!
So what Arnab Goswami is saying today is basically the voice of so many. Why do you feel surprised? It is not about gagging the media but about who is playing in whose hands & whose reportage is helping whom. It is also about knowing & trying to understand what actually the endgame is. And do not tell me that media & media men & women are all pious saints. They also are commercial entities after all.
You must remember that you have the unfettered freedom of reporting on anything, saying anything you like & are able to do so in this country of ours. At the cost of repeating I am again saying that this is our country, our country of close to 1.3 billion people. You are also free to report the way you want & practice what you like because of this country, called India & that too as it exists today. This freedom also comes to you naturally, as well as to all its inhabitants, because Hindus, whom you so much detest because of their ‘fault lines’, are in a majority. And in saying so I have no hesitation. Barkha, kindly think of a situation if this was not the case. Under those conditions you would have ended up like Tasleema Nasreen.
PS: And by the way Barkha you have still not forgiven Arnab Goswami for snatching the ‘exclusive’ interview of Rahul Gandhi from you & your channel way back in 2014 that was promised to you ‘voluntarily’ by Priyanka Nehru Gandhi Vadra!!!
You are pretty shrewd & intelligent; Madam & you need not be reminded that Nehru also promised plebiscite to Kashmiris ‘voluntarily’ as they were not actually looking for it at that moment in history. Plebiscite was never held*.
Hilarious, isn’t it Barkha!!! These are called the ‘fault lines’ of Indian Media. Only the names change: Nehru to Priyanka Nehru Gandhi Vadra.
JAI HIND
*Obviously how do you hold it now?!
JAGMOHAN SHARMA 