Lal Masjid News

Thirteen died as a bomb exploded on 27 July at the site

Penblunt & Hogwash

Codes of Discontent

Penblunt

It’s a season in full bloom for the broadcasting industry, what with the Broadcast Bill in the offing and a media summit by Indian Television Dot Com, along with an associated Awards for the New Television channels organised by the dotcom paper, just over last weekend.

It is a season, if I may say so, of biting acrimony, and that too, at two levels: between the media and the government (a la Broadcasting Bill and the Code of Conduct); and an internecine war within the confines of the industry itself….

And this gives me an opening edgewise, because I have been dwelling on the ills of the “grab-‘em-by-the-short-‘n-curly” approach to TRP ratings as the sole route to moneymaking, as is the scene now in the (TV) news space.

The media was up for splits last weekend at the NT Awards, or the first ever attempt to criteriarise (I insist upon coining the term) was made by the dotcom mandarin of broadcasting in the country.

It was also in splits, as Dibang, NDTV, and Rajdeep Sardesai, CNN-IBN, shed garbs in the open, the former stubbornly and stridently, and the latter under the garb of a purdah.

The issue was jadoo-tona-bhavishyavanee-ultababa-katee-taang kiskaa hain, versus a more sterilised approach of what the news said in real times.

There emerged a unique suggestion from the Summit of Indiantelevision.com.

It said (moved first by Mr Naqvi of Aajtak) that there should be a segregation between News and Reality TV, and that each should compete for free-market revenue (read advertisement revenue) on its own category.

I am all for Naqvi…, at 49 and 25 years into the servitude of a scribe, and having savoured with disgust the stale wine of so-called news and rotten meat of sting operations, there seems to be a dire need to define news.

When I was in the Patriot, the late lamented left-oriented newspaper, it had a slogan pasted on the office walls (real walls, not false ceilings, as is the case now with news channels, literally and figuratively), which said the following:

News is everything that someone somewhere wants to hide…. Everything else is advertising!

Today, news, as defined in an unregulated and uncivilised, TRP seeking media, is so crass that it borders on illegal entertainment, and I am distressed why the Bar Girls of Mumbai got such raw deal after all.

The point is, that the industry has no common voice.

They touted this issue of segregating news and reality TV and then both, as the latest seminar hosted by the Federation of Indian Industry and Commerce, sat on opposite sides of the fence.

The only exception was Mr Naqvi, who just reiterated the position that he had unveiled at the dotcom summit.

This is the point.

The broadcasters have been having a free-for-all in terms of content providing.

Most of them have been within limits if public decency, if I may posit myself as a member of the public with go-able knowledge of laws regarding decency, propriety, national security and such other basic issues.

Yet, I myself perceive a problem with the basic TRP-guided market and especially the nakedness – not the nudity – of the Hindi broadcasting media, which it seems would look at you askance if you wore clothes otherwise.

Nevertheless, as a person who assumes to be a commentator and presumes he would be accepted as such, let me say (and I can say this with impunity because I know history had no garbage bin too for me, so I am immune to further questioning by law), that a code of content is much required for the media…

Till we learn to behave.

At the moment, we are not!

In My View

Tough Love for Musharraf

It takes one piece of good news to erase weeks of misfortune. President, Gen Parvez Musharraf of Pakistan was searching for one such big event that could turn the tables on his tormentors inside Pakistan and his main ally, the USA. He found it in the ejection of the militant mullahs from Lal Masjid in Islamabad.

Just a few weeks ahead a leading South Asia pundit, Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution, had proclaimed that the problem with Musharraf was that he likes to be *loved.* As a sure sign of his apparent weakness, Cohen had charged that Pakistan*s military ruler did not even promulgate *martial law* after he took over power in a coup against the tottering Nawaz Sharif regime.

A few weeks later Musharraf took on an entrenched bastion of political Islam, much promoted by a preceding military dictator, Gen Zia-ul Haq – one who was closely studied by Cohen himself. The ones who read tea leaves to gauge the power barometre, found Musharraf firmly in control. He, on cue, promised to root out extremism from “every corner” of the country and ensure that seminaries and mosques were not misused. Some believe that he actually means business, this time again.

But the US media, like carrions, wanted more. They wanted Musharraf removed lock, stock and barrel. They wanted Washington to severe ties with his regime and *rededicate* to its cause of supporting the people of Pakistan.

Amidst all this cross currents of opinion, Musharraf would need to seize the political initiative and chart out a course that not only satisfies his clientilist relations with Washington but also appeals to his core constituency of the uniformed forces who showed a marked desire to lay down their lives for a cause championed by their chief. Along the way he could try to regain ground with a section of Pakistan*s population whom he should have courted assiduously much before he signed on to the American enterprise of cleaning Afghanistan off the evil of Islamic radicalism, loved only till the former Soviet Union had to be evicted.

These were the people who had begun to bite his baits about being inspired by a Kemal Ataturk, thus a reformer who would challenge the growing influence of Islamism. They had been his countrymen – the so called liberal elite - who were fearful of the new concert of Islamist militancy with the underprivileged and the disenfranchised, threatening their edifice of pelf and power.

While that pressure had been building up from the bottom, there was also the weight of decades of excesses at the top, thus leading up to the argument of a *failed state.* But Musharraf got distracted with 9/11 and the desire to do a Zia-ul Haq – thus get a quick fix solution to systemic malaise.

What he would need to do now would be far more stringent, if he has the stomach to follow through on Lal Masjid. He would have to address the issue of young boys from the poverty stricken families populating the ranks the jihadists. One aspect of that problem lies in the economic backwardness of Pakistan, which has two serious dimensions.

First is the failure of the State system to deliver economic respite to the lower rungs of the society due to systemic inabilities to create an equitable environment, further exacerbated by such endemic slippages due to widespread corruption – a charge that Musharraf has levelled against the chief justice of the country, Ifthikar Choudhary.

Second, he would have to stop the highly corrosive influence of unaccounted flow of funds from dubious sources in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that go into funding the seminaries and mosques – the veritable rabbit warrens religious radicalism.

The other aspect is more ideational. That too has essentially two sides. One is to define the waltenschuung for Pakistan*s existence. No longer can the country define its nationhood on the negation of the reality of India and its accidental Hindu roots. It would have to find an alternative, which is suitably modern and yet retaining certain elements of the Fichtian vein that stated *any alleged revelation of God's activity in the world must pass a moral test: namely, no immoral command or action, i.e., nothing that violates the moral law, can be attributed to Him.*

Last, Musharraf would have to cut Pakistan*s umbilical chord with its primary ally, the USA who has taken more out of Pakistan that it has given. Earlier, Washington had used the country as a pawn in Cold War politics, and now it has turned the alliance into a self-serving tool to take on the dark forces of Islamic fanaticism, without catering to Pakistan*s own needs of nationhood.

A view from India would seem that Musharraf*s plate is full and his glass, half empty.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in

Hezbollah Rising

In My View

Nuclear Gauntlet

The United Progresive Alliance (UPA) had set a target in its first days in power. And the Defence Research & Development Organisation (DRDO) has delivered. In the process, it has put Dr Manmohan Singh government to a test for living up to some of its own promises made in the wake of the civilian nuclear deal being negotiated with the USA.

For the news, that DRDO has handed over India’s first submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM) to the navy; and that the attendant SSBN (nuclear powered submarine) will be ready next year, must have shaken quite a few decisionmakers in various world capitals out of their cocoon of predictability.

The development augurs a substantial shift in India’s nuclear posture if actually the Advanced Technology Vehicle (ATV) – as the nuclear submarine is technically called even now – takes to the seas next year. A SSBN requires a deployment posture qualitatively a world apart from the other two components of the nuclear triad. In the case of the latter two, a debate can be continued whether they need to be recessed or a ready arsenal. But in case of the former the missiles would have to be fully weaponised; with launch codes issued to the commander outside of the regular command and control suit.

For India that is particularly important, because the country has a stated second use doctrine. So theoretically, if the ‘first use’ by an adversary decapitates the nuclear command authority, it would devolve on the commander of the SSBN to give the necessary riposte of the ensuing Armageddon. And considering that India would not have high levels of redundancies built into its nuclear warfighting structure, the task of the SSBN/s would be onerous.

The news of the Indian SSBN coming into play next year follows information of last week that the new Chinese SSBN has been located at port and its picture available on Google Earth. Called a Jin-class or Type 094 submarine, which is expected to replace what is believed to be the unsuccessful Xia-class (Type 092) - a single boat was built in the early 1980s – the US Office of Naval Intelligence calculated in December, 2006 that the Chinese might have built five such boats.

In that light it is also imperative to take into account the prime minister’s statement at the DRDO programme this Saturday that India was not interested in an arms race.

But more importantly, this potential development could develop a kink in the country’s ongoing negotiations with the USA and the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group. The latter’s approach to the nuclear deal with India is markedly different from the way New Delhi would like to view them. For them the byword for an accommodation with India is ‘strategic restraint.’ That covers all aspects of nuclear weapons development; technological, doctrinal and operational. Considering the Indian SSBN would create a quantum leap in the country’s capacities, it would signal substantial changes in its nuclear posture.

This writer had written in 2004, in the Hard News magazine that “They (the new UPA government) will have to take tough decision in their five year term on how to pace the development of the nuclear powered submarine project (coyly termed Advanced Technology Vehicle) so the country can complete the nuclear triad. And then again once it gets completed, the government will have to decide whether to deploy nuclear armed ballistic missiles on them – an axiom that leaves little room for manoeuvre. This will have to be followed by extension the decision about how to define the command and control of those weapons aboard a submarine that stays underwater most of the time, thus creating communication hurdles.”

Singh’s government seems to have fulfilled the first condition of ascribing its approach towards the country’s nuclear deterrent – ‘pacing of the ATV project.’ They will now need to take the attendant decisions that create the operational environment for the SSBN.

The DRDO, on the other hand, has taken a major leap in unshackling itself from many of the calumny that has been heaped on it in the last few years. Faced with multi-billion dollar procurement plan of the armed forces that can make and unmake many fortunes, alongwith the USA making a serious bid to enter the Indian market on the back of its ‘strategic partnership,’ serious doubts were cast on the DRDO’s ability to deliver on promises about indigenous weapon systems. With this new development it has fairly responded to many of its critics.

But the UPA government has to begin where the DRDO would end. It will have to decide how far the precipitous slope of the nuclear mountain it wishes to climb, and where does the minimum mark of the ‘minimum credible deterrent’ lie. It will also have to decide how much its platitudes about not enjoining “zero sum games” carry. And from that perspective, how much will all this secure the people of India?

Pinaki Bhattacharya, located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi newspaper of Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be located at pinaki63@dataone.in

Penblunt & Hogwash

National Readership Survey 'surveyed' and found guilty

Penblunt

Why should the media take all the bashing all the time?

Take this one: the good word is out that now the NRSC (National Readership Studies Council) bullies will have to sober down, bashed down by a newspaper backed by a court order.

What the national big boys at TOI and HT could not does, a regional big boy, Rashtradoot have achieved, ensuring a level playing field and transparency with the NRS surveys. That the opposite was true was always known but had to speak as ‘alleged’ fudging of figures of readership.

The NRS has been caught with its hands down, and told the High Court of Delhi that in the future it would set up a Grievances Redressal Mechanism in handling disputes relating to those all important figures for which newspapers pay a fat cheque but have no guarantee that they would get justice.

The NRS had apparently gone out with an agenda to teach Rashtradoot a lesson for filing a case disputing their figures of the paper’s circulation… and what figures!

In one town of Rajasthan, the NRS said of the sales figures of 2003, Rashtradoot had not sold a copy. Not a single one.

It was not likely Rashtradoot would let go so easily, and they did not. They stuck on to the case, and then NRS did what I feel is abject dadagiri: when the next round of NRS survey came up, and after Rashtradoot filed and paid their fees to be included (which is normal procedure), NRS bosses wrote to them saying the Council had unanimously decided to keep the paper out of all future surveys!

Rashtradoot then moved the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission and got an order to include them, but NRSC surreptitiously went to Supreme Court and got the order stayed.

Allow me to put on record that it was the paper’s efforts but nonetheless, it was a special drive undertaken by the present president of Indian News Paper Society, H C Cama that got the paper and the Council to sit together and draw an agreement.

It gave the newspaper industry for the first time ever a Grievance Redressal Mechanism, which would consist of newspaper representatives, and for good measure, Rasthradoot would be included in it as a member.

This Council did the ‘unthinkable’ but the industry in the end got the ‘unthinkable.’

So, if the figures for Rashtradoot could be slashed down to impossible levels, is it not possible that the figures for TOI and HT are being propelled t to the skies? Is there any sanctity left in this survey? For the case in hand has brought out clinically what the NRSC is capable of.

Let’s see now whether the Council actually implements the agreement and abides by the High Court order, but in the meanwhile, it is time someone did something about the other rating mandarins, the TAM and its TRP, which drives the television industry.

The organisation gives TRP, or Television Rating Points that in the absence of any other mechanism is taken as the correct figures for the TV industry as far as viewership on each channel is concerned.

But what is the sample size of the TAM monitoring machine?

Out of a cable home universe of something like 80 million, TAM has a sample base of a little over 6,000. Insiders say they are unhappy with the situation, but cannot do anything about it.

What is happening, though, is interesting. It is CAS that has is challenging the TAM figures.

In Calcutta, for instance, the records show that the channel which claims itself to be supreme, and claim Calcutta will be on flames if they shut down, has bombed. Out of a CAS universe, which is roughly 60,000 homes in Calcutta, 50,000 have opted not to watch that channel!

CAS is becoming the great leveller now in the TV world, whose content and viewership claims are both make-belief. CAS has shown across the three metros that the so-called prime pay channels have all been roundly rejected.

No wonder that the Indian Broadcasting Foundation, the omnibus body for broadcasters, called for a meeting with the MSOs for the first time to see how they would handle an extended CAS situation.

The fact that the pay channels have been dropped by the viewers came to light when a prime English news channel migrated to the Free to Air arena.

Then a Hindi news channel, with a weird mix of superstition, religion, yoga and utter crude stuff posing as news, which had all along been on FTA, increased its rates by 50 per cent, justifying (correctly) that it was getting more eyeballs than many other news channels put together.

Eventually what will happen is that the advertising industry will have to completely reorient its budget allocations, and it is possible that some of the purses that the newspaper industry had lost to the TV chimera, will migrate back to print.

In My View

India’s Day Out

Christmas is the time when Hollywood studios usually release the important movies of the year – the feel good ones – when American good always proves victorious over Evil. One such movie a few years ago was “Baby’s Day Out.” Readers might recall the superhuman things a baby in a crib did to emerge triumphant at the end – and all coincidentally. More specifically, each circumstance presented such specificities that they all worked out in the baby’s favour. Some may call it providence; others would simply say that it was being in the right place at the right time.

For some strange reason, while writing this column on India’s engagement with the world on the nuclear issue, one remembered about the film. Like the baby in the film, Indian elite too wanted to have their day in the world stage. They wanted to be one of the Big Boys. And they wanted to be seated at the same table where the sole superpower of the world holds sway. So George W Bush decided to give Indian a chance. “What’s the big deal? Its no skin off our nose,” he must have thought.

But the nuclear realm has complicated rules, not just to maintain the monopolies of those who are mostly the propounders of such rules that exempt them; but also to ensure the interests of those allies who have foresworn the nuclear weapons option for various reasons. So in the current negotiations with the USA for a civilian nuclear agreement, India is not just dealing with the USA, but sizable sections of the world – mostly belonging to the West– who are tied to each other and the USA by umbilical chords of interests and obligations.

But who constitute the Indian elite that were so desperate to engage the world? In terms of social anthropology, this is a blend of upper caste, upper and middle classes, who have achieved the most of what comprises the material Shangri La and seeking a sort of spiritual actualisation that social mobility affords. But in the nuclear realm, there is a little twist in the tail. For in nuclear arena of science and policy, the leadership is in the hands of upper castes from southern India and from Punjab.

The southern Indian upper caste is a dispossessed lot, to an extent even disenfranchised in their homesteads because of the social reform movements that overtook that part of the country in the early 20^th century. They flocked to the nation’s capital and by the dint of their sheer merit and a little nepotism; they created spaces for them in seats of national power. They are mostly politically powerless in popular terms, but are great wielders of political power attained due to their key positions, thus holding certain disdain for the world at large.

The Punjabis are seemingly intellectual contrasts of the former. Kings of good times, they are bothered primarily with their patch of land or their trade. Ingrained in their trait is a distrust of the local ‘outsider,’ so given a choice they would rather side with the real ‘outsider’ only to keep at bay the local threat. In one critical aspect, they are similar to the southern upper caste gentry. Right from the British times, they have seldom rebelled against foreign intruders, but have instead sought to work within the system put in place by the intruder and try to make it work for themselves – in some cases that meant, for India also.

So they did not want to buck the trend by seeking to negotiate with the USA on the nuclear issue. What they wanted was a little accommodation. They wanted to keep the nuclear bomb because (a) it created a reason for their sustenance; (b) it symbolised ethereal power to be exhibited internally and sometimes, externally. But they also wanted to be acknowledged as India’s scientific masters by their international peers. And that was being denied to them by the technology denial regimes.

When the BJP-led NDA government decided to fulfill their supremacist dreams for parity with the more powerful nations of the world through a series of nuclear explosions, there was a coalescence of interests with the above groups. The latter did not find fault even when the NDA went to Washington almost on its knees (India’s ambassador to the USA then, Naresh Chandra made the first contact with the Americans after Pokhran II not through official channels, but through an American researcher then in India, George Perkovich) seeking ‘accomodation.’

But power, even devolved power, is not so easily obtained. That fact was in evidence a fortnight ago when India’s key negotiator on the civilian nuclear deal, S Jaishankar, addressed a gathering of mostly Western strategic community in New York. Irrespective of what he spoke – much has been written about it in the newspapers since – the terms of reference in the room was India’s “strategic restraint.” When Jaishankar argued that India’s ‘no first use’ policy and ‘minimum deterrence’ posture – and the unsaid voluntary moratorium on testing – were all elements of ‘strategic restraint,’ his listeners were not convinced. They wanted more.

Clearly, for most of India, the negotiations would be an interesting byplay to watch as it deals with the politics of floods, flood relief and the inevitable rehabilitation, the next few days. Of course, there is that little statistic of about 500 farmers – middle peasantry, thus recorded – committing suicide in Maharashtra alone.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issue. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in