Keeping the media out of the India-Pak talks is a one way road to hell

Sandipan Sharma’s generally cogent arguments about the Indo-Pak talks getting back on track with the NSA chiefs meeting in Bangkok (wonder how that venue was chosen?) indict the media and I am sure that much of it is his satire on display.

You can make media the villain all you like but you need it, believe me, you do. Such talks would indeed be fragile if they were jeopardised purely because of the discordant symphony of a ‘white noise’ media orchestra tunelessly interpreting the lyrics. At some stage the contents of such a meet need to be made public, and the media, good, bad and ugly, is the only legitimate conduit. The more ‘shadowy’ and ‘secretive’ the meetings, the more sinister the implications for the nation’s right to know (oh, please, other people can use that phrase in the appropriate context, it hasn’t got a copyright.)

The danger is that if the government and its organs begin to like this furtive approach and start to enjoy dumping the media then the fourth estate can turn into a gassy marsh and be made obsolete. That is the first giant step for any ‘gorrmentkind’ towards dictatorship and the autocratic rule that we still believe we must resist. Muzzle the media.

The other factor that rises in my mind in a more spectral fashion is the reduction in accountability if we begin to cheer lustily at the government’s shrewdness in keeping the press at bay. Why seek virtue where no virtue exists.

Sure, in recent years we have, as a profession, allowed grandstanding, deceit and incompetence to filter into what was and still should be an honourable career. Sandipan can be forgiven for the call to consequences when we run away with our sense of self importance but it is a bit unfair to tar everyone with the same brush.

At the risk of holding a candle for my fellow newsmen and women let’s just say there have been casualties on the way and many a good soldier has fallen wearily by the wayside victimised for practicing journalism the way it should be. By the rich, the powerful and the conspiracies within.

Not everyone has taken the lift, some of us have struggled up the stairs fighting stoically for those wily and elusive little rascals called truth, justice and the damn underdog.

While this tactic may have got a bit of heat off their backs can we dare to recommend it to our government agencies as the viable option? I’d be a lot more comfortable with the chanting crassness of the media today, with its warts and all, than to be excluded from the party.

If you hack it right politicians and bureaucrats would love to keep the media away. They are not paragons. If they know this is the Centre’s preference they would go berserk. Sauce for everyone, sorry, no press, on your bike. Like it or not, even the crudest of our tribe does act as a watchdog, mangy, perhaps and even rabid, but still capable of a snarl.

It is also a misnomer, Sandipan, that things would get done more effectively if media did not derail them. Governments working in secrecy would make Brutus and his honourable men as diabolical as convent school kids.

Perhaps in the beginning there would be this illusion of excellence sans the pressure from the press but in double quick time we would discover that ignorance is a road to burning books. And where you burn books (or newspapers) you soon begin to burn people.

I would leave it to the people of the country to like, dislike, accept or reject what the media writes but they have to be invited to the show. You cannot review it unless you witness it.