Ashok Mitra's scathing attack on media

If the price is right, the letters will be printed

Is not there a huge misunderstanding at work? The culture of writing letters to the editor, a colonial curiosum, is sought to be grafted into the postcolonial soil. This country during all these post-Independence decades has, however, hardly been a prim, stable system in the grip of the bourgeoisie, whatever the illusion of the latter. Post-Emergency, post-Mandal Commission, post-Babri Masjid destruction, India is a most messy affair. It is worth considering how Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar has come to be accorded retrospective deification more than half a century after his death. Our current inheritance is a coarse, uncouth, relentlessly cynical terrain.

The coup de grâce has been afflicted by economic liberalization, setting at total disarray the parameters of the system. Illiteracy, for one, is fast replacing rational discourse. As long as one is reasonably acquainted with the lingo of the information technology universe, it is possible to get along famously, that is, make piles of money, with no need to surf in any other direction. Familiarity with art and literature has zero lucre-yielding prospect, unless one is savvy enough to climb the bandwagon of, for example, event management or public relations or the electronic media. To stay relevant, it may actually often be necessary to feign idiocy. Globalization-mongers detest history and are proud of their disdain for philosophy; so steer clear of these themes too. Culture is whatever is telescoped into pastilles dispensed by the gobblebox. Little tolerance is shown for news which does not concern one’s narrow sphere of interest. The demand schedule is king. The traditional newspapers have to convert themselves, for dear life, into tabloids. They have been forced to move away from hard news; gossip and visuals are enough.


The central message of globalization — make money whatever the means — has led to the inevitable consequence: indulgence in corrupt practice has turned into passport for social recognition. Since no stigma attaches any more to financial skulduggery, the news industry has taken to it as effortlessly as a duck takes to water. News can now be manufactured if the price is right. Space has to be found for such fabricated news.

Remember the story of the Texas hillbilly who struck oil under his land and was all of a sudden flush with money? At the end of a busy day in town, he stopped for a drink at a wayside inn, right next to the precincts of a newly set up university. He was curious to know what a university did and was told it produced PhDs and the innkeeper had the franchise from the university to sell the doctoral degrees. The hillbilly felt expansive and bought a PhD for himself by dishing out a thousand dollars. As an afterthought, he laid out on the table another thousand bucks and purchased a PhD for his horse as well. That is roughly the state of affairs in India as of this moment. The strange animals who die to write letters to the editor are altogether out of place here. On the other hand, one never knows, they too could easily imbibe the ethos of the free market economy and offer hard cash to newspaper editors to get their lofty thoughts published. If the price is right, the letters will be printed, which eventually will have nothing to do with the quality of their contents.

Ashok Mitra in The Telegraph. Here

Egypt in India: Who knows whether a time bomb is not ticking here.

The conjuncture of open corruption, high unemployment and uncontrolled inflation is capable of creating a situation where even the safety-valve of periodic elections could be rendered infructuous; people might not have the patience to wait for the next elections or they may lose faith in all parties, including those currently in the opposition. The searing flames from Tunisia and Egypt could reach our shores too.

True, globalization has crushed the organized trade union movement in the country; its lure has also sucked in a section of the middle class. The immiserized rural poor are both riven by caste animosities and dispersed in hundreds and thousands of villages, apart from being victims of illiteracy and a low level of consciousness. It is nonetheless an uncertain horizon, and on account of a probability to which attention was drawn nearly 90 years ago by Allyn Young, the Harvard economist. Pick a country bumpkin from a wilderness, let him roam aimlessly in the thoroughfares of a metropolis like London or New York, he will watch the city lights, the procession of fleeting cars, rows of huge mansions and skyscrapers, the billboards and huge departmental stores, the assortment of smartly attired men and women rushing about. At the end of just one week, he will no longer remain a dumb country bumpkin, he has absorbed the sights and sounds of metropolitan existence, he is a changed human being, his awareness and intelligence have shot up even though not a penny has been spent to improve his bearings.

This is the imponderable factor. Television, the internet and cell phones have enabled India’s rich to become enormously richer. These, at the same time are directly as well as indirectly, raising the level of consciousness of the country’s impoverished, exploited, hitherto mute millions. Such awakening is a dangerous incendiary. The trade union movement may be dead. The peasantry may be inordinately backward and faction ridden. Thievery at high places coinciding with massive worklessness and inflation could nevertheless, without the courtesy of a warning, give birth to a nationwide fury convulsing the system. Who knows whether a time bomb is not ticking somewhere.

Ashok Mitra in The Telegraph.  More Here.

It is a shame that we will have more billionaires than Europe or Japan

 
On reforms with a human face: There is no human face. It is absolutely dehumanised. Let me be blunt. With so much of poverty and destitution, a billionaire has the audacity to build a house worth Rs 5,000 crore when half the population of Mumbai lives in jhopad pattis. This is what economic liberalisation has brought about.
On the rich and poor: Three hundred million Indians still starve, getting less than the minimum nutrition needed. Another 300-400 million are not starving but are poor. On the other hand, we have the emergence of billionaires. It’s a shame that we will have more billionaires than Europe or Japan. Discontent is going up as disparity gets pronounced. Sooner or later this will get mobilised, as in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Manipur. There will be more such pockets and we will face an incendiary situation. The politicians are unaware of the prospects that lie ahead. As for businessmen, they think they can rule forever through foreign favour and exploitation.

From Ashok Mitra's take in Outlook. More Here.