The Silent Pages

“When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.’’

– Yevgeny Yevtushenko

The Kasturi Building at Anna Salai in Chennai shows no visible signs of cracks in its walls. But something may not be meeting the eye. Scepticism can lead you to look for craters in the wall dividing the editorial and business (read advertisement) side of the paper headquartered here. The paper is no ordinary one, it claims (not without good reason) to be one of the last bastions of credible journalism in India. Talking of dividing walls would be modest, the paper sometimes has hinted to be ergonomically and morally more ambitious by talking in terms of dividing floors. In a panel discussion about the state of Indian media in 2007, occasioned by 60 years of India’s independence, N Ram (the then Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu) had claimed his paper to be in the league of The New York Times, which has separate floors for its editorial and business wings.

What if such credibility with a section of your readers, or even cult followers, has a subtext of marketability? Credibility, if cashed, is one of the surest routes to laughing all the way to the bank (the danger is that it may be suicidal for it in the longer run). Even a glance at the Delhi edition of The Hindu (with circulation second only to its Chennai edition) can give you a sniff of how marketable cult following can be. Some of the reasons for the growth of this cult have been briefly alluded to in my earlier piece, which can be accessed through the link http://www.newslaundry.com/2012/02/uninformed-in-the-information-age/.

Carving a dedicated readership among civil services examination aspirants always had the potential of milking a cash cow. If examination is a disease in this country, doctors are definitely out of frame. The show is run by quick fix quacks offering the ‘rote’ prescriptions. Delhi, which has emerged as the den of aspiring Babus over the last two decades also, houses the 750-1000 crore IAS coaching industry. And if The Times of India is indispensable for the media campaign plans of FMCG, clothing and automobile brands, the civil services coaching industry can’t think of better visibility for their ‘tutorial’ products/packages than The Hindu. Staying on the building imagery, if you have been to Mukherjee Nagar and Rajendra Nagar (the hub of IAS coaching shops in Delhi), you would find the buildings covered with hoardings of these teaching shops (competing and colliding with each other) strikingly similar to front page, inside pages and classified pages of The Hindu. The pages look cluttered with the assorted spreads of competitive coaching recipes.

Front Page Ads

Classified pages

Interestingly, these hubs can also provide you with a clue about why coaching shops make a beeline to get an ad booked in The Hindu. On book stalls you would get publications like The Hindu at a Glance (which is a current affairs ready reckoner covering news stories and editorial commentary which were published in The Hindu), and in Hindi you have it in Hindu Ek Nazar Me (you can also get ‘digests’ that translate The Hindu’s news stories, articles and edits verbatim). The inexplicable and somewhat absurd monopoly of The Hindu in this space is also reflected by how newspaper hawkers charge low-budget coaching start-ups for placing their ad stickers on the front pages of The Hindu.

The Quiet Pages and a disturbing silence

But the pages of The Hindu have been quiet on something. And the silence is disturbing, loud enough not to be ignored for long. With walls and floors remaining where they are, the things between the editorial and business can still be cosy with silence. Shhhh. To use a cliché, the conspiracy of silence has made the editorial and business sides of the paper survive a marriage of convenience, and of course, lot of ad revenues.

Isn’t it disturbing that the most credible voice of left-of-centre discourse in mainstream media has chosen to be tight-lipped on the huge financial loot and pedagogical slaughter that define the operations of these teaching shops? Have you read any editorial comment or feature story or article in The Hindu which has attacked the dark underbelly of coaching mafia? It sounds hypocritical for the simple reason that The Hindu had taken a strong editorial stand against the corruption in private technical education institutions in 2005-2006, and on the debate on financial autonomy to such institutions. How selective moralising can have its moments! And certainly it can have scathing moments of ‘editorial independence’ with institutions that aren’t big-time advertisers with The Hindu. With false claims (as fraudulent as quacks and Babas bombarding TV screens), ridiculously skyrocketing fees, murky financial transactions (large-scale tax evasion) and ‘cut and paste’ merchandise masquerading as ‘teaching’, the IAS coaching industry is certainly one ‘untouchable’ that fails to provoke any moral outrage in the sanctimonious editorial pages of The Hindu.

Interestingly, this editorial apartheid has spilled over to its sister publication Frontline as well. The fortnightly magazine comes up with an advertorial called ‘special feature’ and you have to note how an advertorial can be turned into a 17-page unashamed platform for coaching mafia endorsement in the May 18, 2012 issue of the magazine. The sponsored interviews of some coaching barons, full page advertisements, dubious figures etc are prefaced by an article, carrying a byline of ‘special correspondent’, which doubles up as ‘surrogate advertising’ with quotes from heavyweights as well as wannabes of the coaching circuit. And as you flip through the ‘left liberal’ bleeding heart articles in the remaining pages of the magazine, you may ask yourself, is it the same magazine?

(The beginning of the article in Frontline, prefacing the advertorial is given below)

Aiming at success 

A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

New Delhi is the hub of civil services coaching institutes which aim at the holistic development of the candidates.

SHANKER CHAKRAVARTY

A class in progress at RAU’s IAS Study Circle in New Delhi.

The subtext of selective moralising is part of larger narrative of a hypocritical streak in the aspiring middle class and ‘liberal elite’ of being comfortable with anything that empowers their upward socio-economic mobility. The anxiety to get that competitive edge through teaching shops has muted the middle class outrage against plundering shops operating in the name of coaching institutes and the smothering of pedagogical imagination. If ‘careerist’ anxieties of the times are shaping the middle class response to the issue, the ‘liberal fundamentalism’ of market economy is how profiteering fanatics defend the teaching shops. Amidst all this, the silence in the pages of The Hindu becomes eerie. You expected its edits to speak for itself. But it seems the dividing walls or even a different floor aren’t division enough. Silence is communicated. Even across walls in Kasturi Building.