ABOUT 500 WORDS
My parents’ generation believed in the sanctity of the printed word. If they heard something new, they checked with the newspapers. Television news didn’t carry the same authority. Often Doordarshan news had to be double-checked with the newspapers.
When private channels arrived, we had to work out the percentage of exaggeration or understatement to arrive at the truth. That skill came with experience and the knowledge of who was pumping in the money. Television did stories that made governments uncomfortable – remember those days? – and some channels protected their most cherished asset: credibility.
In the recent phase such ideas have been thrown to the wind. Credibility - what’s that? The public’s right to know has to be balanced against the channel’s right to exist! The middle path, the bridge connecting two extremes, collapsed unmourned long ago.
He who pays the piper decides what the truth is. That is the essence of the post-truth world. When politicians scream ‘fake news!’ and dress up lies to look like the truth, we wonder what it is we can trust, what brings us close to the real picture. Television channels are beyond the pale.
Surprisingly, and uniquely, the credibility gap is being filled by books. Books such as M. Rajshekhar’s Despite the State, Arvind Narrain’s India’s Undeclared Emergency, Suchitra Vijayan’s Midnight’s Borders, Kapil Komireddi’s Malevolent Republic, Aakar Patel’s The Price of the Modi Years, Josy Joseph’s The Silent Coup, S Rukmini’s Whole Numbers and Half Truths.
Even Ramachandra Guha’s Rebels against the Raj is, beyond the biographies of foreigners who played a role in the freedom struggle, an attempt to help expand fast-contracting minds focused on a single idea that aims to squeeze everything to fit that idea.
We are in an age, to quote Komireddi, “of audacious gaslighting by the powers that be and their minions among the opinion-formers.” In another place, Komireddi quotes from the 1980s novel English, August where a character says: “from washing your (backside) to dying, an ordinary citizen is up against the government.” The author uses a shorter, crisper word for the one in brackets.
You need not agree with everything these writers say. But they provide something our news media do not – a way of looking at events beyond the screaming ‘us versus them’ debates on television or the anodyne on-the-one-hand-while-on-the-other favoured by many newspapers.
Books take time to get published, yet many of these tell us something new and revealing. This is important because their theses are not given a public airing by the news media.
Power flaunters and their sycophants have a contempt for facts. Facts depend entirely, wrote Hannah Arendt, on the power of man who can fabricate it. And we have professional fabricators everywhere who tell us in effect that two plus two equals five; it is amplified by the megaphone wielders.
As Winston Smith says in 1984, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.” The books mentioned show us how to add correctly.
( Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu)
