How many of you know who Mark Tully is? I always ask the audience of senior officers at both our civil and military institutions, when invited to speak on the role of the media in our democracy. Almost all hands go up if the audience consists of officers with upwards of 20 years in service. They speak of Tully, for long the BBC’s legendary bureau chief in New Delhi, in admiration, even reverence.
Then I ask the follow-up question: Who is the BBC’s chief of bureau in New Delhi now?
I have never, in the past 10 years, had anybody answer that, even make a guess. In fact, nobody can name any of the senior, competent and successful professionals who stepped into Tully’s oversized floaters.
But this is not merely meant to be a compliment to Tully, a brilliant colleague and fellow traveller in India’s newsiest decades. When my mother wouldn’t believe Dhaka had fallen in 1971 and Rajiv Gandhi wouldn’t believe his mother had been assassinated until each had heard it on the BBC. Nor is this meant to be an unflattering comment on Tully’s successors. It is just to make the point that the growth of India’s own journalism, particularly in the electronic media, has liberated us from our dependence on foreign media. We never needed any foreign journalist to tell us, for example, what was going on in Kargil, even in the first few weeks when the news looked all bad and baffling.
This is the real story. As democracies grow, evolve, deepen and mature, their reliance on the international media for news about themselves declines. It follows that the clout of the foreign press corps in their capitals also declines accordingly. That is exactly what has happened in New Delhi through two decades of reform. The political class, the bureaucracy and even Indian journalists no longer hold in awe the bureau chiefs of the BBC, CNN, The New York Times, Time, The Guardian, even The Washington Post. They are fellow journalists covering our country, rather than super-powerful and super-connected foreign journalists who set the agenda for us. Of course, this was was also helped along by better salaries, easier foreign travel and availability of legal Scotch and wine, which narrowed the gap between the native and the expat. This change was further hardened by the fact that over these two decades, the focus of the world media shifted to what is now called Af-Pak. In the glory days of the Western media in New Delhi, all South Asia bureau chiefs lived in the city and travelled to the region, including Pakistan, when something really major, like a coup or an assassination, happened, leaving the rest to stringers. That balance of power has now shifted, as the bigger story has moved there.
That is why the recent commotion, over the Western media’s criticism of the government, particularly the prime minister, is surprising. Even more intriguing is the coverage given to these stories and views by us, in the Indian media, particularly on TV. It is anachronistic to see Time and The Washington Post hitting the national headlines for calling the prime minister an underachiever, or a silent and tragic figure. Why have we continued…