Indian Press on News Channels, UN and Re-Making History: New Age Islam's Selection, 28 September 2020
By New Age Islam Edit
Bureau
28
September 2020
• Small Minds Try To Re-Make History
By T J S George
• Untamed Spirit
By Sevanti Ninan
• UN Failed In Its COVID Response, But What
About PM Modi’s Record?
By Manoj Joshi
• The Show Must Go Off
By Vivek Yadav
-----
Small Minds Try To Re-Make History
By T J S George
27th
September 2020
By
re-writing history, can Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh delete history? What has
happened has happened. By omitting facts from textbooks, we will not make them
no facts; we will only make tomorrow’s students uninformed.
Throughout
history and across cultures, those in power have tried to restructure history
to suit themselves.
Facts were
buried in the process, but they remained facts for impartial students to dig up
and study. Being narrowly focussed on their self-interests, politicians are
always inclined towards re-writing history with the aim of glorifying
themselves.
The
Maharashtra State Education Board removed chapters about Muslim rulers and
Mughals from history textbooks last month.
Uttar
Pradesh is doing the same thing now. A generation of Maharashtrians and Uttar
Pradeshians will grow up ignorant of the fact that Mughals ruled India.
It will
mean nothing to the Mughals. But it will mean illiteracy for those who are
taught selective history.
It is
strange that hardened ideologues do not see the negative side of this kind of
approach to history. Sangeet Som, articulator of a hate-line BJP approach, had
no hesitation to say: “History will be rewritten to erase Mughal Emperors from
it.”
Who is he
to do so? His boast means nothing because his mind is too small to grasp the
significance of things. He was a critic of the Taj Mahal’s history, but felt
compelled to accept that marvel in marble as a work of art. Beyond the Taj,
however, Sangeet Som has a stand that is self-defeating and ignorance-based.
“What kind
of history are you talking about,” he asked. “The same history in which the
person who built the Taj Mahal imprisoned his father? Planned to annihilate all
Hindus? I guarantee you that this history will be changed. Whether it is Babar,
Akbar or Aurangzeb, the government is working to erase them from memory.”
No
government in the world can erase historical figures from mankind’s memory.
Unspeakable cruelties became state policy under rulers like Ivan the Terrible,
Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Idi Amin. But they will never be erased from
our memory.
A Pope did
everything from murder to incest (John XII, 954-964) but he too will remain in
history, complete with his criminal record.
The Mughals
not only built the Taj Mahal (which Rabindranath Tagore described as “a
teardrop of love”) but also set certain standards that did India good. Ashoka
and Akbar are rated as the greatest emperors of the past.
But it is
worth remembering that Ashoka showed his greatness by feeling guilty about
killing a hundred thousand people in the battle of Kalinga; remorse led him to
embrace Buddhism and become a messiah of peace.
Akbar
became a messiah of tolerance without a bloodstained Kalinga giving him a
guilty conscience. He took Hindu wives but never asked them to convert to
Islam.
He even
prohibited cow slaughter in his empire. His initiative in getting the
Mahabharata translated into Persian is legendary. Yogi Adityanath may boast
about deleting the Mughal Period from history, but no Mughal, no Akbar, no Shah
Jahan will get deleted from history.
The only
consequence of his attempt will be more people wondering how yogis get into
politics. Facts cannot be eliminated even by saffron-clad sanyasins.
The
sensible course open to authorities like Adityanath is to explain the facts in
context. They should teach why Ashoka became Ashoka The Great, why Akbar became
Akbar The Great. (And why Yogi Adityanath did not rise to those levels of
greatness.)
It became
known last month that Iran has been trying to rewrite history. Its 2019
textbook contained a story depicting two little girls and three little boys
playing outdoors. The 2020 version of the book had the picture minus the girls.
Policymakers also decided that women were not good enough to study maths and
physics.
This is all
the more ironic because Iran is a country where there is a 50-50 male-female
ratio in universities. The dictatorial Shah of Iran had banned the veil. But
the 1979 revolution led to the black chador becoming common.
Religious
training was now added to the national curriculum. In 2019, just last year,
Omar Khayyam’s name disappeared from several textbooks. That space was given to
poems about Iranian martyrs in Syria and Lebanon.
So, does
Omar Khayyam cease to exist? When the clouds are cleared, his name will glitter
across the sky like Akbar’s does in the Indian sky.
Re-writing
history is the hope of small minds. Fortunately for mankind, small minds perish
in their smallness.
https://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/t-j-s-george/2020/sep/27/small-minds-try-to-re-make-history-2202295.html
-----
Untamed
Spirit
By Sevanti Ninan
28.09.2020
Yet another
media trial, yet another television channel accusing Muslim citizens of jihad
this year, and we are back to contemplating the perennial excesses of Indian
news television amid fresh calls for institutional control.
The list of
institutions, which have tried to make the worst offenders of television news
behave, is already long. Even before judges of the Bombay High Court and the
Supreme Court expressed surprise and indignation this month, other high courts,
the apex court itself, the Central government, state governments, individual
chief ministers, state legislatures, Parliament, the Law Commission, the
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, and self-regulatory bodies have all
attempted at some point to tame errant newscasters. Broadcast regulation in
India has become everybody’s concern and yet they fail miserably to stop the
excesses.
We have
also failed to pass an effective law. India has no statutory broadcast
regulation today because the industry and the government could not agree, all
these years, on what such a legislation should look like. The mention of
regulation makes the media bristle and not entirely without reason. Any draft
the government has come up with over the years has had draconian fall-back
provisions.
Draft
broadcast regulation was introduced in 1997, 2001 and in 2007. The Broadcast
Bill of 1997 and the Communications Convergence Bill of 2001 lapsed with the
dissolution of the respective Lok Sabhas. The Broadcasting Services Regulation
Bill of 2007 did not get very far either. In 2011, the second UPA government
decided to set up a National Broadcasting Content Complaints Council instead
that was meant to, at least, make private sector broadcasting more accountable.
But that did not materialize.
So it is
perhaps entirely in the fitness of things that last week, a long-time
practitioner of what we consider objectionable TV journalism was given a Zoom
platform to explain why television news is the way it is. An anchor whose
channel back in 2007 was one of the first to attract a 30-day ban from the
ministry of information and broadcasting but who bounced back and has
flourished since.
He offered
the following wisdom. “The line between entertainment and news has disappeared,
there are new consumers of news to cater to. They want a news channel to be a
one-stop shop for both information and entertainment, and they want it for
free. So we have a ratings-based business model, and TRPs have nothing to do
with discipline or responsibility. The more irresponsible you are, the higher
your ratings will be.
“Responsible
conduct is irrelevant to the viewer. Just as people do not reject politicians
who break rules, they do not reject news which breaks rules.
“Viewer
prefers gossip to news about farmers. My programme on Sushant Singh Rajput got
35 lakh views on Facebook, and the one on farmers got 7 lakh views. But how is
the polity any different? Where is the CBI jaanch when a farmer commits
suicide? Is anyone going to the Supreme Court for justice for the farmer?
“Channel
owners have been compelled to make their editors into film producers. They are
expected to follow box office formulas, and show what their box office
collections are like. Today if I have not screamed, or driven somebody out of
my studio, I will fall behind in my box office performance.”
The first
takeaway from this box-office logic is that self-regulation will not make a
dent in the practices of tabloid news TV. Why would they want to self-regulate
when they have to compete to sell viewers to advertisers? Serious fines that
hurt their revenues are more likely to dim their enthusiasm for re-enacting an
actress’s death in a bathtub, or reconstructing an actor’s suicide or
conducting a media trial of his girlfriend and her family.
The Bombay
High Court expressed surprise this month that the government had no control
over the electronic media and wanted to know why television news should not be
regulated by the State.
But it is.
The Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act of 1995 has a programme code and
an advertising code, which government personnel, including district
magistrates, are empowered to implement. And the ministry of information and
broadcasting is a de-facto regulator, imposing arbitrary TV bans on channels
whenever an internal committee thinks it fit and giving permission to telecast
by controlling up linking and downlinking of television through licences.
But the
government’s use of the Cable TV Act is arbitrary and, in the current instance,
unapologetically partisan. Earlier this month, it let Sudarshan News broadcast
the controversial show called ‘UPSC Jihad’. It asked the channel to ensure that
the show does not violate any programme code prescribed in the Cable Television
Networks Rules, 1994, knowing full well that it does. Newslaundry counted at
least five violations of the programming code. It said the show caricatured
Muslims as power-hungry brutes with terror links abroad who would hijack the
country’s resources if they made it to the bureaucracy.
The
outraged judges of the Supreme Court then made scathing observations while
restraining Sudarshan News from broadcasting the remaining episodes of its
controversial series. When you don’t have effective regulation, the highest
court of the land resorts to undesirable pre-censorship.
Regulation
governs television, radio and telecom licensing in other countries, sets
technical standards, promulgates ethics codes, and receives and adjudicates
complaints with fines, which can range from moderate to severe.
In 1995,
when a Supreme Court bench decreed that India should have an independent
regulator to govern the airwaves, it should have become the impetus to
recognize that given the media boom happening a wide-ranging regulatory
institution needed to be put in place with different branches governing a range
of needs.
Today we
have a government ministry licensing and regulating television, a separate
regulator for telecom and broadband, a soft-touch regulator for the print
media, and self-regulation for advertising and news TV, alongside the ministry.
We don’t have the one institutional mechanism that might rein in outrageous
violations by broadcasters — an independent, statutory complaints council
empowered to levy substantial fines. Few will remember that the first
Broadcasting Council mooted was in the Prasar Bharati Act passed by Parliament
in 1990. This was meant to take complaints from the public regarding any
broadcast by Prasar Bharati. By the time the Act came to be notified in 1997,
the proposed Council had been dropped.
But given
the burgeoning media and viewers addicted to over-the-top programming, what the
good judges should be asking for is not more regulators but an effective
complaints redressal mechanism.
----
Sevanti Ninan is a media commentator and was
the founder-editor of TheHoot.org
https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/untamed-spirit-news-television-is-immune-to-regulation/cid/1793220
----
UN Failed in Its COVID Response, but What About
PM Modi’s Record?
By Manoj Joshi
27 Sep 2020
Prime
Minister Narendra Modi’s address to the UN General Assembly’s annual session
was fairly anodyne. He spoke of achievements, laid out complaints and put out
promises linked to India’s non-permanent membership of the UN Security Council
next year. And, he made a pitch for India to become a permanent member of the
UN Security Council.
To this
end, he invoked size, demography, culture, and ancient heritage. As well as a
series of claims of achievement under the rubric of “Reform-Perform-Transform”
that he said India was operating under.
The PM was
right in blaming the UN for the several wars and terrorist attacks that the
world has suffered. After all, the organisation was set up to prevent them and
its Security Council was given unprecedented powers to deal with them. But, for
all its flaws, the UN is not easy to replace.
Most people
believe that with four of the permanent members supporting India’s bid, it is
only China that is the problem. They may not be aware that even the US, our
alleged principal backer, does not want India to get the kind of permanent seat
that it and China have.
As Nikki
Haley put it in 2017, when she was the
US ambassador to the UN, the key to get India into the UN “would have to be not
to touch the veto.” In other words, India would have to be satisfied with a
second class status, even in a reformed UN.
Actually,
most observers believe, that given the present geopolitical situation, reform
in the UN is not a likely proposition. In other words, Modi is whistling in the
dark.
The
failures of the UN system have been manifest for some time and the lack of a
coherent global response to the COVID-19 crisis has brought this out sharply,
as pointed out by Modi. But whether India joining the high table would make a
difference is another matter.
Beyond the
natural right of a large country, Modi insisted that India needed to be taken
seriously because of “the transformational changes” happening in the country.
Actually, what the world is likely to insist on is not a “transformational”
country, but a transformed one.
India
gained a lot of support, especially from Russia and the western countries in
the UNSC in the wake of its nuclear tests and economic surge in the early
2000s. But, in recent years, that promise has waned.
Not only is
the Indian economy sliding, but the liberal democratic foundations of the
Indian Republic are withering away, aided by the political forces that brought
Modi to power.
As it is,
some of the transformational changes enumerated by Modi are strictly in the
government’s own mind. People do read and have eyes that can see. They would
be immediately have been struck by the
credit the PM is seeking on account of getting “600 million people free from
open defecation in just 4-5 years”.
Pointers
are there from a recent report of the C&AG. Central Public Sector
Enterprises claimed they had constructed 1.4 lakh toilets in government schools
in recent years, but 40 percent of those surveyed were found to be
non-existent, partially constructed or unused.
So, we need
to be cautious before accepting the claims Modi made before the UN, that India
is providing Digital Access to its citizens, piped drinking water to 150
million households, connecting 600,000 villages with broadband fibre optics. Or
that in the past “2-3 years, more than 500 million people have been provided
access to free health care services”. There is a huge gap between claim and
performance of the government.
A lot of
data was fed to the UN, but a lot of information relating to actual
implementation and actions of the government is being denied to the public and
even to Parliament. Indeed, in terms of opacity, the Modi government has
exceeded itself in the recent truncated session of Parliament.
It was, of
course, one thing to kick the UN on account of its lack of effective response
to the COVID-19 pandemic. But what about Modi’s record? The seemingly transforming
country finds itself unable to cope with the challenge of COVID-19.
Vaccine Promise a Pure Hype
Nothing can
match the incompetence and callousness of the government’s performance in
locking down the country and forcing 10 million people to trudge hundreds of
kilometers to their homes in the height of summer.
Given the
fact that the full dimensions of the pandemic have yet to manifest, Modi’s
promise at the UN on the vaccine front is pure hype: “I want to give another
assurance to the global community. India’s vaccine production and vaccine
delivery capability will work to take the whole humanity out of this crisis.”
This came a
day when Adar Poonawala, CEO of India’s major vaccine producer, Serum Institute
of India, wondered whether the Union government would have Rs 80,000 crore to
purchase and distribute the vaccine within this country over the next year.
It takes no
genius to realise that unless money is provided upfront, and now, there will be
no vaccine, even for India next year.
Is Modi Govt Fighting COVID Crisis With
Expertise or Artifice?
One wonders
whether the Modi government is aware of the real dimensions of the crisis.
Having coerced the media to deliver propaganda, playing down the scale of the
crisis, the government is now being taken in by its own artifice.
Some of the
requirements of the vaccines are complex, some needing multiple doses, others
requiring a deep cold-chain, not just the ordinary one, to ensure the
effectiveness of the vaccine. The governance capacity that the Modi government
has displayed does not make for too much optimism on this score.
India may
not have caught up with the fact that its image in the liberal international
world is now fading. Repeated “masterstrokes” like demonetisation, GST roll
out, splitting and down-grading Jammu & Kashmir, have not just failed to
yield results, but caused great misery. This has not gone unnoticed around the
world, even if the Indian media has consciously underplayed it.
A recent
article in Time Magazine said that Modi has governed India in a manner that has
ignored India’s fabled religious tolerance and diversity. “The crucible of the
pandemic became a pretence for stifling dissent. And the world’s most vibrant
democracy fell deeper into shadow.”
Strong
words repeated by long-time friends of India like Ashley Tellis, who said that
many liberal powers aided India’s ascent and its rise was “widely welcomed.”
But “a recent wave of policies widely perceived to be illiberal has eroded this
confidence.” If India moves away from its liberal character, the West’s
eagerness to partner India will be diluted.
Modi’s
advisers may have convinced him of India’s standing and heft. But the reality
is that we are simply not important to either the US, the EU, Russia or China
in terms of trade and commerce. Even in the area of security, India’s domestic
compulsions – many self-created – are such that they preclude India from
playing a significant extra-regional role.
Perhaps one
day, the UN will be reformed and India will get the seat in its high councils
as a great power. But that day will not come till the time India gets its act
together in economic and political terms.
No amount
of manipulating the narrative at home and massaging public opinion in the West
is likely to work. The world will look for heft, and not hype, before making
that decision.
----
Manoj Joshi is a Distinguished Fellow, Observer
Research Foundation, New Delhi. This is an opinion piece and the views
expressed are the author's own.
The New Age Islam neither endorses nor is
responsible for them.
https://www.thequint.com/voices/opinion/pm-modi-unga-address-india-transformational-change
-----
The Show Must Go Off
By Vivek Yadav
Rather
than leading others into action, politicians today aspire to enthral and
entertain. Representative image. Photo: Reuters
----
Since the
supernatural has made a return on news television, we might be forgiven for
engaging in a little black magic of our own.
Suppose,
then, that using a conjuring trick learnt from our television anchors, we could
summon the great philosopher Abhinavagupta’s spirit from some other worldly
realm where it reposes in perpetual self-relish to present-day India.
To be
beckoned to the mundane loka in this season of death is a misfortune we ought
not to wish upon any half-decent spirit, least of all on a philosopher as great
as Abhinavagupta. But as a loka addicted to real-life drama we stand in urgent
need of his philosophical counsel to guide us out of our present predicament.
Abhinava is
of course the most famous proponent of that philosophical paramparā which for
almost two millennia has reflected upon art more systematically and with
greater insight than any other intellectual tradition in the world. But in
times like ours, it might be more pertinent to point out that besides being a
first rate philosopher, Abhinavagupta was also a Kashmiri Pandit, whose
ancestors had been brought to the valley by the king of Kashmir from Kannauj in
present-day Uttar Pradesh.
Perhaps the
first thing Abhinava would notice about present-day India is the complete
effacement of the boundary between nātya and loka, which he had so carefully
demarcated in his philosophy.
The
Kashmiri strand of Rasa philosophy, which completely revolutionised Sanskrit
aesthetics near the end of the first millennium A.D., regarded the mundane loka
as devoid of rasa. To this niras loka of serious ends and real actions, the
Kashmiri philosophers counterposed the playful world of art. Nātya was for
Abhinava the locus of aesthetic relish (rasāswāda), which he understood to be
the most exquisite pleasure known to mankind.
But
confronted now with real-life drama, a liminal form which seems to belong
neither to nātya nor to the loka, Abhinava would arrive inevitably at the
staggering conclusion that nātya had emerged out of the theatre and become
entangled with the loka.
Thus,
fictional narrative, which otherwise forms the backbone of drama, now routinely
accompanies actions in the real world of politics. Political actions today
present themselves clothed in a layer of self-narrative, which takes the sort
of liberty with facts which has traditionally been the prerogative only of
poets and writers of fiction. We can only imagine Abhinava’s exasperation as he
would struggle to parse the real from the unreal in present-day political
narratives. It would soon become evident to him that outside the theatre a
fictional narrative serves only to obfuscate and distract from reality.
If
encountering fictional narrative in the loka would disturb Abhinava, what he
sees next would positively alarm him. Politicians and dramatic characters today
effortlessly cross the ontological boundary between the unreal world of the
theatre and the real world of politics, as if it were a line drawn in sand,
easily overstepped.
While
film-stars have been seamlessly making the transition to politics for several
decades, outside the theatre these actor-politicians seldom provide evidence of
the same exemplarity of character they so artfully display on the stage.
Exceptions aside, the vast majority of these actor-politicians stand out as
exemplars only of naked opportunism.
Film stars
turning to politics, Abhinava would note, is only the flip side of an
altogether more dangerous transformation, as a result of which present-day
politicians have come to resemble stage-actors. From the grand master of
ceremonies to the lowly anchor, political agents of all shades and stripes seem
to have learnt a thing or two from their dramatic counterparts. Rather than
leading others into action, politicians today aspire to enthral and entertain.
But unlike
the stage-actor who openly acknowledges the artifice involved in dramatic
acting, these real-life actor-politicians do not acknowledge the artifice
involved in their own performance, thus perpetrating a particularly insidious
sort of deception upon the audience.
But perhaps
nothing can prepare Abhinava for the shock he would invariably experience when
he realises that not just fictional narrative and dramatic personae, but rasa
itself had made its way out of the enchanted world of the theatre and permeated
the mundane loka.
The
artificial, and thus other-worldly (alaukik), emotions portrayed in drama are
called rasas because they are relished by the audience. Since the audience are
aware that the dramatic action is not real, they are free to relish the
emotions being portrayed on the stage. But there is a playful deception
involved in nātya, which led Abhinava to liken it to a jaggery-coated medicine.
Just as bitter medicine is ingested all the more easily when coated with a
sweet layer, nātya indirectly delivers to its viewers a rasa-laden learning,
which in turn sets them firmly on the path of propriety, the highway leading to
the fourfold ends of mankind.
Nātya,
after all, had been created by Brahma as a fifth, and universally accessible,
Veda, in order to deliver the loka from its vulgar ways. But, as Abhinava would
note aghast, the very same nātya, upon emerging outside the theatre, has itself
transformed into a vulgarity of sorts. It is not merely that politics has
become more akin to drama; the electorate too seem to have developed a taste
for spectacular politics. The show on news television is sustained by a
peculiar sort of pleasure that viewers derive from relishing real-life
emotions.
Media
personnel surround Bollywood actor Rhea Chakraborty as she arrives at NCB
office for questioning, in Mumbai, September 6, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Francis
Mascarenhas/File Photo
Real-life
drama aims at providing to its audience a relish of sorts in real emotions,
which are directed at real issues, situations, and persons. But unlike rasa in
the theatre, the experience of tasting real-life emotional states is an
improper pleasure. If rasa within the theatre is vehicle of truth, this
real-life (laukik) rasa is intended to mislead the audience, and obscure from
them the truth of the matter. Addiction to this perverted pleasure, Abhinava
would plainly observe, is far more dangerous than to that green herb which
performers and audiences in India have consumed for millennia past to heighten
their aesthetic relish.
Instead of
a mirror of propriety, peering into which the loka could learn the ideals of
propriety, real-life drama, then, is more akin to a dark mirror of sorts, which
everyday disseminates into the loka new kinds of improprieties.
Thus
beholding the monstrosity called real-life drama, which had been hiding in
plain sight all this while, Abhinava would no doubt see it for what it is — a
form of violence. To the extent that it serves to obfuscate facts and distract
from reality, real-life drama is a potent weapon in the hands of the
orchestrators of publicity today.
Utterly
disillusioned with our world, and desiring to leave the loka to its own
devices, Abhinava would at this point undoubtedly wish to take our leave and to
return to his eternal repose. But before turning his back to us, the wise
philosopher shall not forget his last duty towards the loka, and offer it a
piece of parting advice.
Lending his
voice to the growing chorus calling for viewers of news television to vote with
their remotes, and turn off their television sets, he would urge us to bring
the dangerous drama unfolding on news television to an end.
----
Vivek Yadav is an advanced graduate student at
MESAAS, Columbia University, where he studies contemporary Indian politics.
https://thewire.in/politics/the-show-must-go-off
-----
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism