Just after the attack on Gandhinagar’s Akshardham temple six years ago, a senior general with the NSG told me quite candidly that live television coverage of the attack proved to be a blessing in disguise, allowing him to coordinate the rescue attempts better while sitting on his desk in Delhi. The NSG commandoes could not get a real-time video feed; and the television pictures, combined with continuous ground assessments from the soldiers, helped the coordinating commanders in Delhi to understand the operational topography better. The Bombay crisis was vastly different. After the first night of frenzied non-stop coverage and constant second-guessing about the “next impending assault” the channels were told firmly by the morning to hunker down and not to divulge any operational details. The hotel television sets seem to have been turned off only in the morning, depriving the terrorists of easy access to information, and in many ways the television coverage is a reflection of not just the Indian state’s response to terror but of the furious nature of change in modern India itself.

Mumbai 2008 is very different from Akshardham 2002 or the Parliament attack in 2001— channels are far more numerous, competition far more intense and most importantly the attack on Mumbai is part of an entirely different canvas. Spread out over a much wider geographic area and involving an entirely different set of variables, this new kind of terror demands an entirely different media response. With at least one television editor repeatedly rebuking his reporters on air, telling them to calibrate their reporting responsibly, we are now entering new territory in live television. This never happened even at the height of the Gujarat violence — the first televised riots in independent India — and the old rules are being swept aside by newer exigencies in an industry infamous for its sensationalism.

... contd.