Opinion Muddle without middle

You see? No middle ground. Not a square inch of it. No asking,okay,the Niyamgiri decision raises the question of (a) how can industry be made to follow green- or tribal-friendly norms (b) how much benefit does industry bring to local people. NDTV saw two bits of ground on two sides,and,of course,things were falling through all the time. One of the big things that fell through,when NDTV was interviewing Orissa CM Naveen Patnaik,was the question of jobs. Patnaik kept making the point that big investment will bring in jobs. That was the cue for NDTV to ask,okay,how many jobs for locals,how much training are the investors giving to locals,what’s the degree of commitment to local employment,etc. But NDTV had posited industry versus people,you see,and when you do that,you can’t very well talk about industry giving jobs to people. Oh,no,absolutely not,that kind of stuff means there has to be a middle ground,and news TV,as we noted,doesn’t do middle ground.

No middle,but plenty of muddle. NDTV said all this (the ruling against Vedanta in Niyamgiri) is happening when the owner of Vedanta,Anil Agarwal,is set to become the richest Indian,beating Mukesh Ambani. NDTV said this was ironical. Why? Why is it ironical? Does being the richest Indian mean your project can’t be blocked? NDTV captioned its chat: Displaced Development. Huh? Development has been displaced,was that what NDTV was saying? If so,its anchor and reporter weren’t following the script. Suddenly,there’s a flash,News Alert: “All concerns have been taken care of”. That was presumably paraphrasing what Patnaik said about his meeting with the PM. That’s a news alert? Wow. Some news. And,incidentally,my concerns were not taken care of at all; concerns centred around the fact that NDTV should ask if governments are making the mistake of chasing economic growth at the cost of rights of poor citizens. There’s a certain paradigm that’s suggested by questions like those. NDTV is free to take any position. But it will be so much better for viewers if it is clearer on that position. Don’t make us take tantalising guesses from questions on chat shows.

Unsurprisingly,CNN-IBN’s Face the Nation chat on Niyamgiri had the environment correspondent say the Vedanta project has been blocked because of grave damage. Hello? Mining hasn’t started. But,of course,no middle ground,you see. The anchor seemed to correct that impression later,but that didn’t stop this question: is Niyamgiri about corporates who violate laws for big profits or does it demonstrate the environment ministry is anti-progress? Hold on! Can’t it be neither,can’t it be about,say,regulation and project implementation? Nope. No middle ground,you see.

Pleasingly,one CNN-IBN panelist did provide some of that rare commodity when he pointed out that one doesn’t need to hold any brief for Vedanta to query certain regulatory decisions and that pitching all locals as being against industry is perhaps somewhat of a heroic assumption.

Middle ground! I excitedly told myself. Perhaps CNN-IBN should have issued a News Alert too: “Some sensible arguments being presented on this show,right now!”

saubhik.chakrabarti@expressindia.com