The Indian media was willy-nilly in focus at, of all places, the United States House of Representatives on Tuesday when Congresswoman Ilhan Omar pointedly told Aarti Tikoo Singh, a prominent and professionally well-regarded journalist that she ought not to present a sarkari viewpoint.

The comment excited a public condemnation from Singh. It was the Congressperson who was biased, she said.

A Twitter trash campaign followed.
Behind all that din and fury, though, the spat has raised several questions. For media professionals, the most basic question is: should journalists make presentations at public hearings of this sort?

A purist might hold that a field journalist’s role is only to report. A journalist watching someone being killed, or a disaster or natural calamity, or a massacre, must record what is happening, not drop her camera and notebook to try and save lives. This school would laud the journalist who walked into a refugee camp yelling, “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?”

I faced this conundrum quite early in my career as a journalist, and made a decision on the spot. I stayed back in Delhi’s Trilokpuri when most of the group of six reporters who had discovered a massacre of the Sikhs there (three days after Indira Gandhi was assassinated) turned back.

An older woman from among the survivors had begged me not to leave, saying the few who had emerged from hiding when we got there would also be killed if we all left. My decision was made easy by the fact that two other journalists in our group reported for the newspaper for which I worked. The story would not go uncovered, I figured.

I decided for myself in the first few months of reporting murders, rapes, fires, and so on that the “right to know” was not greater than the right to humanity.

Personal and public

As for giving testimony, I thought it my duty to give testimony to an inquiry on police inaction during that massacre of the Sikhs — as a citizen who had witnessed tragic events.

Were those events politically loaded? Without doubt, they were. Should a journalist committed to objective, dispassionate professionalism then have got involved? To the extent that the rule of law was compromised, I have no doubt the answer is yes. Possibly yes in other circumstances too.

The question in the context of Omar’s remarks is: should a journalist offer a viewpoint as part of such proceedings?

When I have interacted with diplomats or a visiting US Congressperson in the weeks since the constitutional changes in Kashmir, I have gone out of my way to emphasise that I spoke as an author who has researched Kashmir in depth.

Singh spoke as a Kashmiri Pandit whose family experienced the ethnic cleansing of 1990 when she was just a little girl.

Illiberal presumptions

Singh could have emphasised that position more explicitly. As it turned out, Omar got a chance to bracket her as a journalist and, so, make cutting remarks about whether a journalist should have stated what sounded like a nationalist position.

A purist of the “record, don’t save” school might hold that a journalist’s vocation is to unwaveringly criticise the incumbent government and others in power.

But there is an obvious counter. At least at such a hearing, to think, leave alone assert, that there can, nay must, be only one valid view of a situation is not only illiberal, it undermines the purpose. For, such hearings are meant to hear and question a variety of viewpoints, to uncover the truth.

Polarised standpoints

The line-up of six speakers seemed in any case to be subtly based on the three versus three pattern of so many Indian news media “debates”. If so, the committee expected two sets of opposing views.

I have always preferred nuance. For four evenings after the constitutional changes in Jammu and Kashmir, I shuttled from one “debate” studio to another. As I entered one of those studios, the anchor — more widely watched than perhaps any other (in English) — welcomed me expansively, “Come, come, sit here beside me. Tell me, where do you stand on this?” 

“As always,” I replied evenly, “I have a nuanced view.”

“But you know that doesn’t work on my show,” he expostulated. 

Most of those who gave testimony at the Congressional hearing would have pleased that anchor; they had a suitably black-and-white view of the situation.

Let’s introspect

Whatever the rights or wrongs of the particular instance — and each must judge by her own lights — this incident should cause introspection about the extent to which Indian journalism has become visibly, indeed proudly, partisan.

One wonders to what extent this partisanship reflects a social media culture that privileges reflexive and repetitive “likes” and “shares” from avowedly Right or Left — even if the reflexive don’t quite know Right from Left.

One must ask whether the influence of social media means that the era of the editor’s balancing objectivity is gone, and the extent to which the migration of advertising from print to digital will boost this trend.

If polarisation is indeed the new normal, perhaps Tuesday’s spat was par for this slippery course.

Also read: Snip, snip: See what ANI did to Nitasha Kaul’s US Congress testimony on Kashmir