From whistleblower law to missing tiger, how our journalism of courage today means India Empowered

A little over three decades later, the same principle was to come handy when time came to resist censorship—and worse—from our own government of the day, during the Emergency. As his forthcoming biography by this newspaper’s former, and highly respected editor B G Verghese (to be released by Penguin in October this year) will tell you, Ram Nath Goenka never used the power of his newspaper. He always believed that an institution like this was not to be an instrument of power in his hands, but a medium of empowerment for the people of his nation.

Truth, knowledge, impartial and accurate information, he believed, were instruments of empowerment. For, these enabled the citizen to ask the right questions, denied the rulers the luxury of avoiding having to give answers and bridged the gap between people and the establishment.

The idea evolved with the times. I was a journalism student during the Emergency and, after the shock of the first three months was over, you knew which papers had the spine to stand up for their beliefs, which ones did not. On my campus, as I am sure in many others, this is when the Express made its mark.

Soon, as you began to scan the the Express for flashes of defiance, sometimes open, like blank spaces in place of editorials that censors had stopped, and sometimes clever, like a tiny obituary in the Classifieds that moaned the “death of liberty, mother of hope, faith and justicia,” it was easy to see why this paper was different.

I was among those fortunate ones who entered journalism, and in fact The Indian Express, just as the Emergency ended. For those of us, cub reporters then, it was a heady feeling when people pumped your hands in awe, and said, oh, you work at the Express. Such a courageous paper!

But courage, in those innocent days, had a simpler definition. Usually, it meant making sure you got the story others won’t bother to reach and telexing it back somehow in days of poor communication. Or exposing a wrong and moving on to the next story, a heady hit-and-run that required courage, intellect, but did not demand that the story be taken to its logical conclusion, with a redressal for the victims, punishment to the guilty.

Until the paper attempted to do just that under one more of my very illustrious predecessors, Arun Shourie, who discovered the instrument of the PIL to follow up on stories like the Bhagalpur blindings. From merely fighting an authoritarian state, journalism of courage was now exposing and taking on its many limbs and instruments that were autocratic and unaccountable anyway. It was with this journalism that the Express then combined with higher judiciary to empower some of the poorest and weakest sections of our society to seek justice.

India’s mediascape was now changing rapidly. Newspapers were being seen more as mere products, the market-place was being re-defined, the rules of the game being re-written, and we were told the basic job of a newspaper was to entertain, amuse, even titillate. Also, that with the decline of the Congress, the politics of the country was too fragmented, instead of one establishment to take on, there were now several. Instead of the notebook, background interviews, anonymous sources, painstaking research, investigative journalism’s new tool became the spycamera: switch it on, record the dirt, pack in both titillation and entertainment, hit Play.

Yet, look at what this paper managed to achieve in this noise. Its series on the Vajpayee government’s petrol pump allotments to its own led to large-scale cancellations and a Supreme Court-mandated inquiry, its investigation (The Great Bank Robbery) on our largest bank-loan defaulters helped the passage of the Securitisation Act, its expose on the defacing of glacial rocks in Himachal Pradesh resulted in a clean-up and its persistence in first exposing, and then following up the Satyendra Dubey murder led not merely to the arrest of his alleged murderers and a clean-up in the national highway project but also in the system moving closer to passing a whistleblower law.

There was, however, a great difference this time. In each case, action happened because others, the visual media, NGOs and citizens’ groups, Parliament and, most important of all, the Supreme Court, were willing to take up these issues. All they needed was information through ‘‘Express-type’’ journalism that wasn’t just courageous but also incisive, credible, sincere, intelligent, dedicated and influential. The results are there to see.

Journalism of courage is no longer hit-and-run guerilla warfare. It’s a medium of empowerment through information that either somebody in the establisment is trying to hide. Or others may not have the integrity, intellect, or courage to discover, print, and then follow up until other institutions, from the media to the judiciary, join in and take the idea to its logical conclusion.

It is amazing how often, and sometimes rather smoothly, such things can happen now. If you have doubts, look at the rapid pace at which things moved after this paper’s first expose (January 23, 2005) that there were no tigers any more in Sariska. Ten days later, we found a similar story in Ranthambhore. The next week, the Prime Minister stepped in.

It is to celebrate this remarkable evolution of our society (and market!) that we have initiated the India Empowered series. As the first few contributions, notably by the President and the Prime Minister show, empowerment through intelligent and incisive information is an idea whose time has come.

At this point, please allow me to dig a little into the memories of my reporting years. In February 1983, then as this newspaper’s correspondent in the North-East, I broke the story of the massacre of 3,500 people in the village of Nellie in Assam. On a visit to Delhi subsequently, I was taken by my editors then to meet Ramnathji. ‘‘You young fellow, you are doing a good job,” said the old man, always parsimonious with praise. And then he added, “I liked that language in of your story…taking a walk across is an act of courage. Must have been tough looking at so many dead and injured?”

Looking back 22 years, yes, it was an act of courage. As it was to drive to Guwahati airport, in a blood-stained white shirt, to hand over the roll of film from my Minolta to a Delhi-bound Indian Airlines pilot and then finding a telex machine in a strike-hit telegraph office to file the story at a time when STD was a luxury and fax not yet invented.

But even today, nobody has been called to account. That massacre, entirely of poor Muslims, has gone un-investigated. Nobody remembers it, nobody complains that everybody got away. Today, if such a thing were to happen again, God Forbid, there is sufficient institutional and political awakening in India to ensure there will not be such an easy forget, if not forgive as this paper’s coverage of the 2002 Gujarat killings (for which it got the International Press Institute award) has shown.

The difference between 1983 and 2005 is, that then information like a Nellie massacre merely shocked you. Today, it empowers you to demand redressal, better governance, better quality of life. That is why our belief that in today’s India, our journalism of courage is an instrument of national empowerment.

So please enjoy the debate and the stories from across the country on the theme in our pages—a wheelchair-bound victim of militant violence in the Valley who is educating schoolkids to teachers in Patna who are opening IITs’ doors to students from Bihar villages. Better still, join the debate. Write to us your own idea what India Empowered means to you and mail it to us at myidea@expressindia.com.

A selection will be published in our special issue next month and all contributions and letters will be posted on our site: http://www.indiaempowered.com. You can also reach this site via our homepage http://www.expressindia.com.