No exits on our Expressway

That’s why it’s an honour and a privilege for me to accept the first IPI India Award for our ‘‘fearless and comprehensive coverage of the Gujarat tragedy and its aftermath.’’ It’s an honour that a distinguished jury headed by Justice A S Anand, chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, chose us among 24 entries for the ‘‘best furtherance of the public interest.’’

I wish to share the award with those who, I think, deserve it more than I do. But before that, I would like to take a few seconds of your time to remember those who, in a way, were the Gujarat story.

Those killed in the riots.

The men, women and children we reached when it was too late. Too late for them to tell us their stories. But, as we found over two years, it’s never too late for the truth to be heard. We are grateful to the judiciary, to the NHRC, to NGOs and our colleagues at other newspapers and TV stations who followed up on our reports and whose reports we followed up, too, all helping to push for justice. There are still countless stories that haven’t been told — we assure you we are working on them.

This award is also a tribute to those who cannot be named but they know who they are. Some of them are in the auditorium this evening. They are what we call, in the self-serving jargon of our business, our ‘‘sources’’. But they are much more than that. They are men and women, civil servants, politicians of all parties, citizens, neighbours, people who will never walk into a TV studio to vent their anger but instead quietly take — and are taking — enormous risks to share the truth with the Express. They are behind many of the truths we revealed. To all of them, thank you. And we need you.

To our readers, a very, very special tribe of people. Who, when they buy a copy of The Indian Express, spend more money per page than for most other papers. They keep telling us that they don’t expect anything less than world-class investigative journalism from the Express and give it to us in the neck when we don’t meet their expectations. Please continue doing that.

To our staff. In particular, to Resident Editor of our Ahmedabad edition, Virender Kumar, and his team of reporters and editors who have been at the story since that February morning two years ago when Coach S-6 of the Sabarmati Express was torched in Godhra. They refused to let fear and intimidation, hectoring and ridicule edit or censor their writing. This award is a tribute to their talent and their commitment.

Many of Virender’s team were kids, in school or college, when they last saw a communal riot. They were taught, and quite rightly so, that in a democracy, you have the right to think the way you do. So you can distrust your neighbour, you can be rude. But you do not have the right to deprive your neighbour of his or her rights. Or his wife and children of their lives. Just because they don’t worship the way you do. That’s a crime and it’s every government’s duty to punish it. And unless this is etched in stone, we have our work cut out for us.

It’s this fundamental belief more than anything else that leads our reporters and editors to take risks, personal and professional, to go out night after night. To cut through the smoke, sometimes literally, to look for the truth.

All this would not have been possible without a chairman like Vivek Goenka. This award is for him, for doing something that has become almost blasphemy in the news business these days: for being an owner and a publisher who doesn’t play the news editor.

Who lets us take the entire front page, several inside pages several days in a row to tell Gujarat stories, day after day, long after the TV cameras have been switched off. Who never lets us know that he’s losing money in the exercise of our freedom, that ads had been pulled out because of some of the stories we had done. And this while some of our contemporaries were distributing CDs and publishing special advertorial supplements.

We are privileged to receive the award from His Excellency Vice President Shekhawat, no stranger to standing up to intimidation. During those two years of the Emergency, he and several others braced themselves every night for the ‘‘midnight knock.’’ Its equivalent in our newsroom is the ‘‘midnight call.’’ A call from the owner saying — often politely — better not to run this, better to ignore that. I am proud to say that not once has Vivek made that call. And even if we disagree, I tell him I am three months older than he is. Case closed.

That’s a sentiment shared by the two publishers who have so generously worked to set up the IPI India chapter. Shobhana Bhartia and Philip Mathew are also two owners for whom advertising revenue has never bought off sacred editorial space.

Vivek asked me to share with you his idea for the award. As many of you know, a couple of months ago, The Indian Express was the first paper to expose Satyendra Dubey’s murder, the IIT engineer who decided to work on the Golden Quadrilateral in Bihar and was killed after he complained of corruption. We have been following that story, its twists and turns, ever since.

To ensure that the Satyendra Dubey story never fades away, to ensure that the ideals he lived — and died — by continue to inspire future generations, we have decided to set up The Indian Express-Satyendra Dubey fellowship at his alma mater, the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

I am happy to announce that the IPI’s Rs 2 lakh prize money will go towards building that corpus. Unfortunately, there is no way to know what Satyendra Dubey would have told us about our ongoing coverage of Gujarat but we know for sure what he would have wanted us to do: to find out the truth. And to tell the truth no matter what the risk.

At The Indian Express, that means doing our job — and trying to do it better every day.

(This is based on the speech delivered by The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief and CEO Shekhar Gupta while accepting the first International Press Institute India Award)