A few days ago, a tweet was broadcast regarding Arundhati Roy, the Booker-prize winning novelist and activist. The tweet’s said: “Arundhati Roy doing her sepoy duties spreading atrocity literature to her foreign nexus paymasters.”

This tweet is remarkable. It implies that the story it is linking to, in the Los Angeles Times, will have Roy unloading on India. It doesn’t. Or perhaps it will reveal details of Roy’s perfidy. It doesn’t. The story is headlined: “Fake news fuels nationalism and Islamophobia” – sounds familiar?

The first remarkable thing is that the tweeter likely hasn’t read the piece (shame on him).

The report opens with:

Pro-government websites in India circulated a story in May saying Arundhati Roy, the renowned Indian novelist, had criticized the Indian army’s heavy-handed presence in Kashmir, the disputed territory claimed by both countries.

India would never gain full control of Kashmir, Roy was quoted as saying, “even if its army deployment increases from 7 lakh to 70 lakh,” numbers equaling 700,000 to 7 million.

The Indian news media ran with the story. Arnab Goswami, the main anchor on a news channel owned by a politician from India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, denounced Roy, author of the 1997 bestseller The God of Small Things and an outspoken government critic, as “anti-national” and a “one-book whiner wonder.”

One BJP lawmaker suggested that she be tied to the hood of an army jeep, like the Kashmiri civilian who was used as a human shield in an infamous incident earlier this year.

The second remarkable thing, I didn’t know that this was a fake story (shame on me). In fact I referred to the ‘BJP legislator’ mentioned here (Paresh Rawal: disclaimer, he is a family friend of many decades) in my Times of India column without knowing he had said that idiotic thing on the basis of a fake story. I read an interview of his on rediff where he defended his call to violence and, as far as I can remember, he was not challenged on the fact that this was fake. So the outrage over Roy was manufactured? How many know that? The story continues:

“There was, however, one major problem: Roy did not make the comments about India controlling Kashmir.

The original source of the report was a Pakistani nationalist site called Times of Islamabad that said Roy — whose name it misspelled as “Rai” — spoke during a visit to Srinagar, the summer capital of India’s Jammu and Kashmir.

So, India’s anchors get their news from Pakistan nationalist websites? That is approaching lunacy. The story continues,

“Roy later clarified that she had not visited Srinagar and made no such comments. But by then she had already become the latest victim of India’s swirling epidemic of fake news.”

India has enough fake news to justify the use of the word “epidemic”.

The story then reports two further things. That most of the fake news is Hindutvawadi and that Times Now and NewsX regularly play up stories that are (and that they know to be) demonstrably false.

The fifth remarkable thing about that tweet is the thread below it. Deranged desis have flung themselves bravely into the fray, again without reading the story, again assuming it’s about ‘Rai’ abusing India. 

I have stayed away from social media all these years because I find it too addictive. Because I would just find a treasure trove of reading that would keep me away from my books. It did not occur to me that there were individuals who had not found the time to access the material but somehow the emotion to nonetheless pronounce on it.

What is the cure to fake news? It is reporting. Individuals working full time on beats.

This cannot happen on television. TV’s money is made during prime time, when it is opinion that holds sway. That is where its investments will be made. That is why is no such thing as a TV reporter any longer. Indian Express editor Rajkamal Jha referred to India’s TV news as “selfie journalism”, meaning news done with the camera facing you and not the material. Quite true.

It is the newspaper that provides reporters. 

In brief let me describe my life as a reporter on the sessions court beat in Bombay (as it was then called). Every weekday morning, around 9.45 or so, I would reach the complex next to Bombay University. It had two buildings, with around four dozen courts. It had no press room and no centralised distribution of information on cases. 

One had to walk from court by court to find out what was happening. When I reached the end, I would turn back and do the round again. And again, till 4.40 pm, so as not to miss out on something interesting happening. I knew all the judges and their staff, most of the lawyers and many of the undertrials. Because I did the exact same thing every day for a long time, I knew the material extremely well. There are 5,000 such reporters (my guess) in India who know narrow material well. These are the people you should get your news from.

If you want to avoid fake news, avoid news channels, avoid social media and subscribe to a few newspapers. Unfortunately, you will not have the opportunity to do that for very long, and I shall write about why another time.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @aakar_amnesty.

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