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D I S P A T C H B A S H A R A T P E E R

StyleOver SubstanceDespite India's m edia boom , its journalism is shrinking

BEFORE MOVING TO NEW YORK IN AUGUST 20 0 6 ,1 MET WIT H FELLOW JOURNA LISTS

and writers in New Delhi. The conversations always veered to an irritatinglyfamiliar topic: Where is the space in Indian journalism for serious, detailed report-age? It is ahiz arre conversation in light of the tremend ous expansion of media inIndia. The econom ic liberalization in the early 1990s produ ced scores of nonsto ptelevision news operations and a number of new newspapers and magazines.Marie Claire now has an India edition;Time Out Mumbai and Time Out Delhi,even Scientific American Indiaare all new additions to the country's newsstand s.In 2005, Random House launched its India operation.Foreign Affairs, Time,and

The Economisthave all recently published cover stories on the "rise of India." Theopinion pages of leading Indian newspapers talk about the twenty-first centurybeing the Indian century, about imminent superpower status.

But as in theU . S .and elsewhere, an expanding media market is no guaranteethat itwill be filled w ith the bes t journalism .Young television anchors and report-ers breaking news to millions of Indian viewers in their faux American accentstry hard to ape Fox News andC N N .Pamela Anderson's silicone implants, ParisHilton's es capades, and sexiest-people lists are mainstays in the daily fashion andentertainment supplements of the leading English-language newspapers. Lastyear in a tow n nea r Delhi, a child fell intoa well and soldiers from a nearby arm ybase came to rescue him . TV news broadca st the dr am a live for two days, hypingw hat their mark eting folks tagged the "Prince ofLife." The story was on the front

page of most new spapers.Mean while, ther e is another side of the " rise of India." Itis adarker side, brim-

ming with comp licated stories that de mand detailed reporting and spacein printor on airto be told properly. In the rural areas of India, for example, th ousa ndsof cotton farmers have comm itted suicide after falling hopelessly into debt. It is acont inuin g tragedy, wh ich h as yet to find its James Agee and WalkerEvans. Withthe exception of the detailed reporting on the subject by Palagummi Sainath, therura l affairs edito r ofThe Hindu, a Madras-based English-language daily, the storyhas been largely ignored. The effects of the industrial expansion on traditional,tribal-dominated rural areas are invisible in magazines and new spapers; they aremostly not interested in such grim subjects.

The unwillingness to allocate resources and time for deeply reported, long-form writing is visible even in the Indian press's coverage of the new economy,business, and the fast-growing Ind ian fashion and movie industries. There are

turned-legislators flying in private jto gatherings of the Indian parliameIndian girls being crowned Miss Woror Miss Universe, about the Indian stain the call-center industry, or the bgeoning ranks of Indian software pfessionals in America and elsewheBut for a handful of exceptionssu

as Tehelka, the crusadingW e b site thbecame a print magazine in 2004, tbiweekly Frontline magazine, and aEnglish-language daily.The Indian Epressthere are no outlets that attemto m a p ,contextualize, and explain thebillionaire public servants and peritetic techiesand through them tjourney India is making.

I have experienced this frustratifirsthand. After the December 2001tack on the Indian p arliamentb y aPakstani militant group tha t operates in disputed region of Kashmir, India aPakistan almost wen tt o w a r.Three mefrom Kashmir, includinga Delhi Univsity lecturer, were arrested and chargunder a controversial law, the Prevtion of Terrorism Act, whi ch allowsuspect to be detained up to 180 dawithout being charged; the burdenproof is on the accused, the identity witnesses is withheld, and confessiomade to police officers w ithou ta lawypresent are admissible as evidence.

Most leading newspapers and mazines described the lecturer as t

"mastermind" of the attack. I coverthe trial for a news portal calledRediff.com. Except for the day the thre e mwere sentenced to death, only a fother reportersnone from TVjoinme in the courtroom. The attack wdescribed as the Indian9 / 11 , and monewsrooms, in the grip of a strong

tionalist sentiment, chose to ignore trials of the accused.

I wanted to write about the trialsome detail, bu t Rediff.comis basicallydaily new s site tha t doesn 't publish lger, explanatory articles. Through soLondon-based journa list friends, I gotouch with the editors at theGuardian'sWeekendmagazine; they liked the idand published a detailed piece tit

"Victims of December13," in July 200A few months later, in October2003,higher court acquitted two of the thaccused in the attack, including the u

i l

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The typical cover story in an Indiannews magazine does not exceed2,000words. When President Bush visitedIndia in March 2006, op-ed and edito-rial writers celebrated the U.S.'s accep-tance of India's nuclear energy program.Stories of the "Indo-U.S. Nuclear D eal"dominated the print and broadcast me-dia. But no one was w riting, for example,about the unusually high rates of can-cer and birth defects among the peopleworking in and living near India's big-gest uranium mine at Jadugoda in thenort hern state of Bihar. I told my editorI wanted to write about this. ButTehelka,where I was working by then, hada smallstaff and meager resources and could no tspare a reporter for sucha story. I neverwent to Jadugoda. Nobody went there.About two m onths later, I left the maga-

zine and resumed freelancing for someBritish and Am erican magazines.

It is no coincidence tha t foreign jour-nalists produce much of the best jour-nalism abo ut the difficult issues facingIndia. A few years back, M atthew Power,a contributing editor forHarper's, wrotethe best piece linking the indiscriminateuse of pesticides by plantation ownersin the southern Indian state of Keralato a rise in the rates of cancer and birthdefects in the villages adjacent to theplantations. The finest explanation ofthe banality of the competing nation-alisms of India and Pakistan was in a9,000-word piece titled "The Cold-est War," by Kevin Fed arko inOutsidemagazine. Fedarko spent mon ths at theSiachen glacier on the India-Pakistanborder, a region over which India andPakistan have been fighting for decadesat a cost of millions of dollars and hun -dreds of lives.

Indian writer s who are serious aboutdoing in-depth journalism also mustlook to foreign venues to find a homefor their work. The foremost Indiannonfiction writer and essayist, PankajMishra, for instance, publishes eitherin The New York Review of Books, TheNew York Times Magazine,or the Brit-ish literary magazineGranta. Most In-dian readers saw most of his pieces ofreportage andessays only recently, whenthey were published togetheras his latest

book. Temptations of he WestHow toBeModern in India, Pakistan an d Beyond. Iasked M ishra howhe felt abou t that, and

he mentioned a story he wrote in Oc-tober for the TimesMagazine,"China'sNew Leftists," about the deba te in Chinaover economic growth andits costs. "Thedebate in Chinahas muc h relevance forus in India," he said viae-mail. "I wishthere was a forum in India where I couldpublish an article like that."

I came to New York on a journal-ism fellowship, and suddenly had ac-cess to various journ als and magazinesthat pu blished long-form w riting. I wasimpressed, for instance, by the spacedevoted to the coverage of torture byAmerican soldiers in Iraq and Afghan-istan, and the Bush administration'spolicies on torture. Yet the Americanmedia we re severely criticized for th eirfailure to dig into this storyearlier. Thecriticism was justified by American

standards, but I had my own reasons

Maybe it isn'trelevan t to talkabout suicide andradiation sicknesswh en Ind ia isabout to be thenext superpower.

for celebrating what theU.S. press did,however flawed.

I grew up in Indian-administeredKashmir, where a separatist rebellionagainst Indian rule broke out in 1989

and where, to date, some 70,000 peo-ple have been killed. In th e early 1990s,Indian troops routinely tortured boththe separatist Kashmiri militants andcivilians whom they suspected of sup-porting or being militants. One m orningin 1991, whe n I was in high school, In-dian soldiers herded all the resid ents ofmy village onto the gro unds of the localhospital, and then searched our houses.We were subjected to identity checks,and many teenagers from my neighbor-

hood were taken into the hospital andinterrogated. I still remem ber hearingthe cries of boys being tortured inside

the hospital, and later seeing bruises andcuts on their bodies.

Papa-2, the most infamous torturecenter in Kashmir, was housed in acolonial mansion on the banks of DalLake in the m aincity, Srinagar, and hun -dreds are believed to have been tortu redthere from the earlyto mid-1990s. While

working on a book abou t the conflict inKashmir, I interviewed many young menwho had survived Papa-2. They carrydeep scars on th eir bodies, some havelost kidneys, and many believe that be-cause of electric shocks to their genitalsthey have become impotent, and as aresult refuse to get into intimate rela-tionships ormarry. I knew one of thosetortured m en; he was the poetry teacherat my school. During the last seventeenyears of the conflict in Kashm ir, I have

read many Indian newspapers and m ag-azines but have yet to seea single maga-zine piece or detailed newspa per re portin the Indian press examining the issueof torture.

Privately, editors in Indiawill say thatcover stories about how Indian m en andwomen behave in bed after age thirtysell more copies than cover stories abouttorture. Marie Claire rules. Maybe it isn'trelevant to talk about sad things, suchas the suicides of farmers and radia-tion sickness, wh en Ind iais about to bethe next superpower. Maybe 400 -wordnews articles detailing the list of Indianbillionaires in the leading English-lan-guage dailiesthe Timesof India an dth e Hindustan Timesare enough, andnobody needs to connect any dots.

Maybe that is why, in all the reports Iread last fall in Indian n ewspap ers ab outa delegation of Indian politicians thatvisited UN headquarters in New York

in November to discuss ways of resolv-ing the Kashmir disputea delegationled by Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, a for-mer federal home min ister of India anda native of Kashmirnobody m entione dtha t Sayeed lives in a refurbished colo-nial mansion on the banks of Dal Lake inSrinagar tha t used to be Papa-2.CJR

BASHAR AT PEER ISCurrently a fellow atColumbia University's Graduate School ofJournalism and working on a memoir of theKashmir conflict. Snowmen and Kalashnikovs:Dispatches from K ashmir,a collection ofreportage he edited, will be published byPicador in India this summer

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