Above: Arnab Goswami and his channel Republic TV have been relentlessly pursuing the Sunanda Pushkar case.
The Delhi High Court pulled up the news channel for hounding Congress MP Shashi Tharoor over his wife’s mysterious death in 2014. No public interest is served in chasing the story of a private individual
~By Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr
Muckraker is a person who digs out dirt about the powerful and the rich who defraud public wealth and interests. It is a homely American neologism of US President Theodore Roosevelt for investigative journalists and writers who exposed the villainy of unregulated and unbridled corporate capitalism at the turn of the 20th century in America.
The roll call of muckrakers in America includes brilliant writers of non-fiction and fiction as well as defiant and lone-wolf journalists like IF Stone and Jack Anderson, along with platoons of journalists working for big and small newspapers across America. So, there is idealism and ethics associated with muckrakers in America, individuals fighting the system.
REPUBLIC TV PULLED UP
However, the chapter on muckrakers in India has not yet been discussed, much less written about. But the Delhi High Court recently took notice of an attempt by Republic TV to rake up dirt on Congress MP Shashi Tharoor whose wife Sunanda Pushkar was found dead in January 2014 under mysterious circumstances. After Tharoor held a press conference recently where he answered questions about the newly-formed All India Professionals’ Congress, four Republic TV correspondents chased him from the venue to his car. Worse, they repeatedly questioned him as to why he wouldn’t answer Republic TV’s questions about Pushkar’s death. In the video of the event, one could hear someone in the crew stating: “You’re a coward” twice. Republic TV correspondent Khalid Shah was heard asking: “Why are you running away Mr Tharoor? Why are you running away like a coward?” Tharoor retweeted another leaked video by a Twitter account called “The Last Caveman” and alleged that he was not just called a coward, but a killer too.
This hounding led to Tharoor filing an application in the Delhi High Court seeking to restrain Republic TV from making defamatory statements against him with regard to Pushkar’s death. The Court stated that Republic TV has to respect Tharoor’s right to remain silent on this issue. It said: “Arnab Goswami and the channel have to respect Tharoor’s right to silence on the issue.” The Court also sought the channel and Goswami’s (founder-editor of Republic TV) reply to the Congress leader’s plea. Tharoor has already filed a defamation suit against Goswami and Republic TV and claimed Rs 2 crore damages from them for defamatory remarks against him.
Republic TV isn’t the first media outlet to try and rake dirt over an individual, though it could be seen as the most vicious. The credit of being the first muckraker in India perhaps goes to feisty Feroze Gandhi, the husband of Indira Gandhi, son-in-law of Jawaharlal Nehru and father of Rajiv Gandhi, who exposed industrialists Haridas Mundra and Ramakrishna Dalmia in parliament in the late 1950s.
UNEQUAL BATTLE
Many newspapers, big and small, in metropolises as well as small towns in India have been engaged in exposing the wrongdoings of the powerful and the rich. Some of them would break rules without ascertaining the facts needed to nail criminals embedded in the political, governmental and economic system. It has been an unequal battle. The famous exposés have not always been exemplary, and the many attempts to lay bare the dirty secrets of the elite have fallen by the wayside. There are no obituaries for the failures.
However, the mushroom growth of television news channels in different languages over the last decade has given rise to sensational coverage, which was more titillating than revelatory. Some of the investigative reports turned out to be false trails, bringing blushes to the media and giving rise to suspicion that journalists in India were neither fair nor factual, and were also power-players. Even ordinary people could readily identify biases in media reports.
UPSTAGING RIVALS
Editors and journalists in India chasing the elusive, good investigative report have always run the risk of fame and notoriety at the same time. This seems to be the case with many TV journalists, especially anchor-editors who are conspicuous for their loudness, vulgarity and explicit political and social biases.
Goswami flaunted patriotism and right-wing nationalism as a virtue in the wake of the terrorist attack in Mumbai on November 26, 2011, India’s own September 11, 2001. He sped past his rivals in other channels by showing his nationalist rage and thereby, throwing out of the window any trace of objectivity and impartiality. It worked at Times Now, the channel for which Goswami worked then as it topped TRP ratings.
It has been an article of faith with journalists in India that the Congress should be attacked for its sins and crimes, its arrogance and self-indulgence. It seemed the right thing to do because the party was in power. And what can be more right for journalists than to attack the party in power.
However, the news script went awry in the last three years with the BJP coming to power and Narendra Modi becoming the prime minister. It should have been the case that both the BJP and Modi should have been attacked as mercilessly as the Congress, Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh. But it was not happening and with good reason.
CRISIS OF CREDIBILITY
News outlets which had thrived on attacking the Congress were right-wingers all through. But with the BJP coming to power, a crisis of credibility arose for them; people, after all, expect the media to be critical of the establishment. Private news channels and newspapers cannot behave like Doordarshan or Izvestia and Pravda of the good old Soviet era.
And Tharoor being a Congress MP was an easy target for the muckraking lot in the right-wing media. It is the kind of sensational story that a news outlet is expected to pursue.
“Arnab Goswami and the channel have to respect Tharoor’s right to silence on the issue.”
—Delhi High Court seeking to restrain Republic TV from making defamatory
statements against the Congress MP over his wife, Sunanda Pushkar’s death
There seems to be the purely provincial angle. One of the big investors of Republic TV is Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a tycoon who is a non-resident Malayalee like Tharoor, and who is an independent member of the Rajya Sabha with the backing of the BJP. He is the vice-chairman of the BJP-led NDA in Kerala. It is natural that Chandrasekhar should be targeting Tharoor, a political rival in the state. That is how local rivalries play out even when the protagonists deny it vehemently. The question is not whether it is right or wrong.
So is the hounding of Tharoor by Republic’s reporters violative of journalistic ethics? In the real world, the game is ruthless and rules rarely matter until the judiciary steps in as the Delhi High Court did in this issue. The Court will now set the rules of the game and both sides have no option but to follow it.
Tharoor too cannot claim that the issue of Pushkar’s death is a private matter. He will have to put up with intrusive inquiries. Republic TV’s reporters, on their part, will have to play the game according to rules set by the court because on their own, they will not want to follow any.
It is not even necessary for Republic TV to show that it is following the Tharoor case in the larger public interest. It is chasing an inherently sensational story of a private individual and so it cannot claim to be a muckraker as understood in the general sense of the term.
In this case, it is not about exposing a wrongdoing in public interest or attacking those in power and who are rich. There is no idealism here. Pettiness is the norm and one cannot rage too much against small-mindedness.
The world is as it is.