OPINION: The role of Indian and Pakistani media

The brave, upright Indian journalist Ravish Kumar richly deserved the Ramon Magsaysay award, and his acceptance speech in Manila expressed the bitter truth about the Indian media, which also applies to the Pakistani media. Kumar rightly mentioned that the mainstream media has, today, largely become part of the state, and spouts the ideology of the state, spreading hatred and irrationalism among the people. Dissenters are branded as anti-national, and shouted down by biased anchors on TV.

However, with great respect to Kumar, what he has missed out in his speech is the historical context.

Firstly, both India and Pakistan are poor countries. Our national aim must be to rapidly industrialise, for large-scale modern industry alone can generate the wealth for providing for the welfare of our people, and creating millions of jobs. We must become a highly industrialised country, like North America, Europe, China or Japan. To achieve this goal, a mighty, historical united people's struggle leading to a revolution is required.

But every great revolution has to be preceded by a long ideological struggle to change people's mindsets. After all, in every revolution millions of lives have to be sacrificed, and people will sacrifice their lives only when they know what they are fighting for. For instance, the French Revolution of 1789 was preceded by decades of ideological struggle by great thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau and the French Encyclopédistes (Diderot, Holbach, Helvetius, etc).

It is here that the media becomes extremely important, for it has to not only inform facts to the people, but also educate them, for instance, by combating feudal mentality and practices like casteism, communalism and superstitions.

No doubt, as Kumar pointed out, the mainstream media will rarely do this, as it is largely in the hands of corporates and is sold out, with profit-motive and pleasing the political rulers as its sole objective. But the social media can do it, and hence it can play an important role in this connection.

Historically, the media arose in Western Europe, particularly in England and France, in the 18th century as an organ of the people against feudal oppression. At that time, all the organs of power were in the hands of the feudal authorities, such as kings and aristocrats. Hence, the people had to create new organs to represent their interests, and the media was one of such powerful organs created by the people. The media represented the voice of the future, in contrast to the feudal organs that wanted to preserve the status quo.

There was no electronic media at that time, and even the print media was rarely in the form of regular newspapers or journals. Instead, the media was mainly in the form of leaflets and pamphlets, which did not require much money to print and publish. These were used very effectively by Voltaire, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, Junius (whose real name we do not know even today) and others, who attacked the feudal system, religious bigotry and superstitions, and promoted rationalism, secularism and modern values. This was of great help in transforming feudal Europe to modern Europe.

The people of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh should, therefore, use the social media for this purpose.

Secondly, both India and Pakistan are presently having a terrible economic crisis and the state institutions have become hollow and empty shells. Most of our “intellectuals” are superficial, pompous, pedants, who have little understanding of India's realities.

Historical experience shows that whenever there is a serious economic crisis that makes the rulers feel their rule endangered, fascist tendencies arise and freedom of speech and expression is often suppressed, as it happened in Italy in 1922 and in Germany in 1933, and seems to be happening in our subcontinent today. The same happened in America in the McCarthy years when there was a 'Red Scare'. So, what Kumar has complained about is nothing new.

In this situation, though expressing and publicising correct ideas has become more difficult, it is even more important, for showing people the way out of their plight and taking the country forward. These can be voiced by patriotic intellectuals in the social media. However, these must be genuine intellectuals, and not the self-centred pseudos who are pompously strutting the fields of academia and the media today.  

Justice Markandey Katju retired from the Supreme Court in 2011

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author's and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK