The world, according to MEA

IT would be a pity if lessons were not learnt from the media’s experience at the Agra summit. It has now been commonly recognised that this was the first summit covered to saturation point by TV. For this, neither the government nor, ironically enough, the electronic media, was itself prepared.

On the eve of a summit, or during one, a journalist would be inclined to turn to two offices for advice: The prime minister’s press office and JS (XP) or Joint Secretary External Publicity. In this case which office should they have turned to?

One would have expected the JS (XP) and the PM’s press adviser to have held a series of meetings to discuss with individual journalists, the TV units, their preferences and requirements. They could then have rationed out their time, made themselves available to journalists at the Mughal Sheraton bar, dining room, coffee shop, the lawns, tossing in a snippet here, a bite there for the network, picking up, in the bargain, loads of stuff from the other side which was leaking like a sieve. Making journalists sit by the roadside for 10 hours without a shred of information was appalling.

Something not overtly recognised in India is another universal truth: In war, as in foreign coverage, the establishment and the media are generally batting on the same side. We should have learnt that from Kargil. Ernie Pyle and Richard Tregaskis made a name for themselves not by glorifying the enemy: They celebrated ‘our men’. When my friend Philip Knightley wrote the First Casualty his theme was simple: When war breaks out, the first casualty is truth — the war correspondent becomes a myth-maker.

Jingoism does not possess us with quite the same passion when it comes to covering foreign affairs, but responsible journalists generally keep the national purpose in mind. Watch the western media on China, Russia, the Balkans, and Middle East and see if you can spot a line at variance from what the respective foreign offices are saying. Yes, there will be an occasional article or debate striking a discordant note but then this dissonance is also part of the liberal choreography. After all, the Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park was designed for people to express all views! But spaces where ‘verifiable’ news is dispensed and ‘responsible’ views are expressed in foreign affairs, whether on TV or the broadsheets, are the spaces where the establishment and the press generally harmonise their adversarial and cooperative attitudes towards each other.

Unfortunately, all coverage of foreign affairs in India is confined to the information handed out to reporters who attend the MEA beat — which in effect means attending the JS (XP’s) daily briefing. Of course, the enterprising reporter can find his way to other MEA officials and scoop the others on postings and transfers or whether or not Najma Heptullah is being allowed by the MEA to carry a high powered parliamentary delegation to Iraq. But such stories are so far between that they fall into the Hyde Park corner category.

During the Cold War, major Indian newspapers had no bureau or even a correspondent in Moscow. Major Indian publications strengthened their western bureaus only since the fall of the Berlin Wall. To this day there are no bureaus in Moscow, Beijing (stringers are not bureaus) and other parts of the globe.

More to the point, there is no coverage of foreign affairs on any of the TV networks. No TV networks has a single bureau, camera unit etc. in any capital. That which is telecast occasionally as foreign affairs is footage bought from AP, Reuters etc.

Since there is no culture of coverage of foreign affairs by the electronic media, how can we expect Nirupama Rao to be prepared for TV networks who appeared in her ken with the suddenness of revelation? Nick Gowing of the BBC flew down personally to anchor the summit coverage. Satish Jacob was to keep him posted of all that was happening at the Indian end. Naturally poor Satish drew a blank. BBC’s Islamabad correspondent Zafar Abbas, in Agra for the event, had access to every Pakistani official on their respective cell phones. The BBC beat the local networks on their home turf. It would be remarkably thick skinned not to ponder these facts.

The saddest story to come out of Agra was this business of identifying journalists as patriots and otherwise. When politicians, civil servants, prostrate themselves before ambassadors for green cards and such like documents for their wards in return for favours — that in my view is absence of patriotism. A journalist telecasts a tape, which everybody including the Prime Minister watches and you damn him for being unpatriotic? Supposing the breakfast had not been telecast, which journalist’s version would North and South Block have believed?

Another point: As far as I can recall, special correspondents covered summits. Editors were briefed or consulted privately.

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