In history, farce and tragedy often come in pairs...

In some ways, the Ajmal Kasab (the lone gunman captured alive in the Mumbai terror attack) saga resembles Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. For want of something better to do, the two tramps Vladimir and Estragon engage in a duel of abuses. Vermin, cretin, moron, they call each other. The winner yells the ultimate insult. “You are a critic,” he screams at the top of his voice as the lights fade.

Long before the court could give its verdict the media pronounced Kasab guilty. But now, case plays itself out, Kasab has done what most people faced with a death sentence do. He has disowned his earlier statement implicating himself. So now he is being called a liar. It’s almost as though being a liar is somehow worse than being a terrorist. What would they ideally want him to do short of confessing to his role in the terror plot? Do they want the man they so revile to act nobly and voluntarily stick his head in the noose?

It is axiomatic that history repeats itself, first as a tragedy then as a farce. Yet sometimes there is such a fine difference between history’s two consorts that it is hard to tell them apart.Take the two events as examples that came towards the fag end of this year. One was the indictment by an inquiry commission of a former prime minister and self-proclaimed charioteer of Indian nationalism. He, along with 68 others was found culpable of razing the Babri Masjid in 1992. In other words they had organised the mobs to tear the Indian constitution to shreds. Much of the media treated it as a minor aberration, a speck of dust merely, and no more, on democracy’s fair name. It was further claimed that Messrs L.K. Advani and A.B. Vajpayee were unjustly dragged in it. It didn’t matter that TV coverage of that event proved otherwise.

Then came the last stages of the Mumbai terror trial in which Kasab, the main accused in captivity, denied any role he had previously admitted to having played in inflicting the gruesome attack. Now he claims that he had travelled from his native Pakistan to act in movies in Mumbai! That’s how he was picked up by police a day before the November 26 attack. He claims he was framed.Perhaps he is lying.

Who doesn’t tell lies to win a court case, particularly when the alternative is a likely death sentence? The great statesmen involved in the demolition of the Babri Masjid have lied even without the fear of the noose.So between the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, which was tragedy and which was farce? The sad truth, however, is that while Ayodhya and Mumbai cannot and should not be juxtaposed or compared, there is a common link. Both have led to rightwing consolidation of the polity, and in the final analysis it is this that has serious implications for India’s democracy.

India’s middle classes want Kasab hanged, they want to lynch him in the tradition of the Ox-Bow Incident. They like to pick and choose their injustices. To them the Liberhan Commission’s indictment of rightwing politicians is passé and boring.The hype around the attacks on Mumbai (the 26/11 incident, as it has come to be called) has similarities with the way the middle classes and the media had approached the attack on parliament on December 13, 2001. On that occasion Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was the leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha. He had cast doubts over the official theory about the attack.We came close to a nuclear war with Pakistan over that incident.

Suppose we look at the hysteria generated by the media in that, which had declared S.A.R. Geelani guilty even before the trial court had sentenced him to death. Considering that the High Court exonerated him of any role in the parliament attack episode, imagine the absurdity, the farce and the tragedy of putting at risk the lives of millions over a false lead.Mercifully then as after the Mumbai attacks a grave possibility of war did not erupt into something more sinister than the attacks had proved to be.

As last week’s Economic and Political Weekly observed, “India could not replicate the US response to 9/11 with its own mini-war of terror by attacking Pakistan, which at one time seemed very imminent but may have been thwarted by the imperative of the US-led war in Pakistan and Afghanistan, a tacit binary was established which effectively blocked legitimate questions around the incident.”

Commenting on last month’s official commemoration of the Mumbai attack, the EPW observed: “The jingoistic hype duly helped by the media reached its crescendo on its first anniversary. While one would expect the nation to come to its senses after the heat of the incident had come down and to ponder over the real questions the incident raised, it was not to be.”

The journal put out an interesting array of statistics. India has faced more than 4,100 terrorist attacks between 1970 and 2004, accounting for about 12,540 fatalities, according to the Global Terrorism Database, maintained by the University of Maryland and the US National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).That accounts for an average of almost 360 fatalities per year.

The earlier attack in Mumbai on 11 July 2006 in the form of serial blasts at seven places in local trains, the lifeline of the city, was executed within a short time of 11 minutes, and the death toll was far higher at 200 and with 714 people being wounded.

In terms of potential, if one may say so, the 2001 attack on the Parliament in New Delhi, symbolising our national sovereignty, in which five terrorists, six policemen and one civilian were killed was far more perilous than the 26/11 attack.

“Why then has the 26/11 episode been singled out as ‘the attack on India’ and projected as India’s 9/11?,” asks the EPW article.The only distinguishing factor in the 26/11 attack is that it is the first time that the elite establishments symbolised by the Taj and Trident hotels were targeted. In terms of casualties, about 61 persons were killed in these two hotels, and of 102 of the rest, 58 ordinary citizens were shot randomly at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) station. In the list of victims there were 37 foreigners.

Among those killed were senior police officials of the Indian Police Service such as Anti-Terrorist Squad chief Hemant Karkare. Although, the CST attack lasted for over 30 minutes just a stone’s throw away from the police posse at the Azad Maidan Police Station the entire resistance effort was directed towards the Taj, Trident and of course Nariman House. Our elitist media also largely ignored the CST tragedy and focused its attention during and after the attack around these places.

At his first press conference after his release, Zakir Hussain College lecturer S.A.R. Geelani referred to the role of the media in his case. It had lent itself to carrying propaganda put out by the police, he said. To the extent that journalists take briefings from the police, often unquestioningly, he is right.

Several of India’s leading national newspapers and TV channels have been exposed as having widely and repeatedly published and telecast falsehoods about the accused in the Parliament attack. The coverage brought India and Pakistan to the brink of nuclear war.

A few years later, when the trial was completed, the Supreme Court acquitted two of the four accused. A third was convicted on a separate set of charges altogether. Mohammad Afzal continues to be on death row even though the Supreme Court held that it had found no evidence to prove that he was a member of a terrorist group. However the judgement went on to say that “in order to satisfy the collective conscience of society” it was sentencing him to death. In modern society, it is the mass media that fashions the collective conscience of society. It is the mass media that is deciding which injustices society should tolerate and which it should not.

Whether Ajmal Kasab is found guilty, or whether he lives or dies will not affect the problem of terrorism that India faces. Yet that hardly seems to matter to those who revel in one sordid tragedy after another, seeking a sound bite here or a quotable quote there. Estragon and Vladimir had found their ultimate insult.

The Indian media and Ajmal Kasab are still searching for theirs...

ARTICLE BY JAVED NAQVI.

A NEWS ARTICLE FROM THE DNA

Here’s a special quiz: for DNA readers. Which two of the following four men are terrorists: David Coleman Headley Tahawwur Hussain Rana Vilas Pandurang Warak Rahul Mahesh Bhatt American investigators working for the FBI think it’s the first two which is why they have been arrested. On the other hand India’s own National Investigating Agency (NIA) seems to think it’s Warak and Bhatt who are the offenders and has been treating them accordingly. Perhaps this is not a time for levity considering that issues of national security are involved, but the fact remains that the NIA has treated Rahul Bhatt and Vilas Warak with a callousness which goes far beyond mere insensitivity. And in the manner in which it has handled these two young men you can see why the NIA fails in its primary duty which is to investigate terror plots and if possible, foil them. There is no doubt that it has failed in this job. Rana – who has a Canadian passport – was in India for three weeks in November 2008 and left days before 26/11. During his stay here he visited five cities – Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Pune and Kochi. Headley – who has a US passport -- also visited these five cities; in fact, he made as many as nine trips into India between 2006 and 2009, but neither he nor Rana were on the radar of the NIA as possible suspects who needed to be monitored. Yet, they were under the FBI’s surveillance, Headley for as long as a year before he was arrested last month and Rana for about half that time. Why did the NIA not have any clue of their diabolical intent? In fact, why did the name David Coleman Headley on a former Pakistani national not arouse suspicion? Why was the Indian Consul General in Chicago in such a hurry to give Headley a long term multiple entry visa? And why is it only now that no one found out that the name Headley was a camouflage for the man’s real name Daaod Gilani, and that he had served 15 months in a US prison for drug trafficking in Philadelphia? These are questions Mr Chidambaram, the Home Minister needs to ask those who are allegedly in charge of our nation’s security. After the colossal intelligence failures which led to the 9/11 felling of the World Trade Centre Towers in New York and the tube attacks in London, the United States and Britain have put into place surveillance systems of such magnitude and efficiency that no terrorist attacks have taken place there since then. This is not for want of trying. The US still remains Enemy No.1 for terrorists, and the UK is not far behind as a target. Yet with the help of intelligence gathering of a very high order, terrorist conspiracies have been nipped in the bud, terror networks have been exposed and many terrorists arrested before they could do any damage. In arresting Headley and Rana, the US may have foiled strikes in India, though it’s still possible that the two have installed sleeper cells in the five cities they visited. If so, the onus is on NIA to identify and neutralize them. Intelligence gathering relies on a network of informers, some of whom would be part of an agency like NIA, but many more of whom would be freelancers or people on retainership who provide information for payment or for reasons of patriotism. While the first kind, the freelancers, are essential for a continuous flow of information within groups likely to cause problems, there can be a huge informal network of the latter, citizens who out of nationalistic altruism will report suspicious activities on one, and only one condition. That condition being that there has to be a responsible and responsive person in the police or the NIA who will listen carefully, take notes diligently and ensure anonymity. Instead of that we get a sordid spectacle of Rahul Bhatt and Vilas Warak being hounded by the NIA, their names being made public so that the media could harass them, and worse, being treated as if they were under some kind of cloud. And why? Because they had the misfortune of meeting Headley by chance and getting to know him. How were they to guess that Headley had a criminal past or evil future intentions when the NIA itself had no clue ? In the US or the UK, the identity of witnesses is never revealed. A press release would have merely said “Two men are helping the police in investigations.” If Bhatt and Warak were volunteering information to the FBI or Scotland Yard, they would not have been summoned to the police station in the full glare of publicity; instead plainclothes men would have visited them in their homes and made discreet inquiries. You can’t blame the media for highlighting a story; it is up to the authorities to make sure the media does not get the story in the first place. In a while the frenzy of the current excitement will die down and Rahul Bhatt and Vilas Warak will get back to their normal lives. But will the ordeal they have gone through encourage other people to volunteer information to the police or NIA in the future? Would you go out of a patriotic sense of duty to report suspicious activities if there was a good chance that you yourself would be treated as a suspect? Is anyone now surprised why our intelligence agencies never gather any intelligence?

The Media Spectacle of terror!

I will not dwell into the seriousness of 26/11 and its implications for that will take away from the point i wish to make here.
An observation that is eating my peace of mind and has hurt me more than the security lapse that caused the disaster.
The media coverage of 26/11...
I'm not making any accusations or conclusions but it would not be absurd to observe that the biggest benefactor of the 26/11 event was the media. For the sensation hungry and competition driven channels, 26/11 was a blessing in disguise. A blessing they grabbed with all the mikes, camera and dramatisation they could possibly garner.
I must be hallucinating but at a point i did feel as if the news reader on certain channels were secretly thrilled everytime a bullet was fired...a life was lost...a commando landed on the roof...or the mob broke barricades hindering the NSG operation.
I could imagine them going a bit gloomy when they announced that the operation was complete and then get suddenly chirpy when there was more firring!!
I'm definately not generalising the entire gamut of media professionals but "Majority Wins" has been a tradition we have been following in all spheres of our life and majority of media today is disgustingly cheap and nasty when it comes to reporting news.
The hunger and restlessness is so palpable that i can sight an incident in my locality in Borivali, national park where a bus that caught fire due to a short circuit was reported on national channels as having blown up in "ANOTHER BLAST AT NATIONAL PARK".
Well....i understand its all about the economic dynamics for how else will you get content to run a 24 hour channel that is competing with more than 50 odd competitors! It makes perfect logical sense for them to behave the way they do...does it not??
Media today has evolved from being a mere medium between the newsmaker and the newsreader to being the newsmaker themselves.
It is the reporter today who not only reports the news but also speculates the reasons behind and the effects ahead of the news...let alone the times when the reporters speculate the news itself!!
I was relieved when at an award function held in Mumbai recently, Mr.Vir Sanghvi a senior journalist and Editorial Director of Hindustan Times commented in his acceptance speech that "Media as an entity has a lot of power and very less responsibility these days and hence it became critical for them to regulate themselves".
As a writer of fiction you tend to get fictional with any and every incident that happens around you and i have been ruminating over a sequence wherein a head honcho of a news channel turns around to face a bunch of ambitious news hungry media men- sitting around with lap tops and brainstorming the channel strategy- and says, "We need to create news where there is none. Go out there and make some news...something big...the uglier, the better." and soon the event has happened and we see the ace news reader almost out of breath, screaming on our faces- "The dreadful has happened...this is the worst....!!!"
What follows is a month long coverage of the event...its causes...its effects...the protests...the signature campaigns...the charity concerst...its victims and ofcourse the victims family who are asked attrocious questions like, "How are you feeling?"...
So you have all the action, drama, emotions, suspense and thrill...the only aspect missing is the end because that is replaced by the start of another catastrophe where the damage may be less but the sensation must be kept the same!