Of Chanakya, Vir & Trust

Most of us do not get too self-righteous about corruption; we have been brutalised by decades of it. But I think we feel differently about attempts to sell off our scarce resources. It’s one thing for an industrialist to pay off a politician to build a factory; quite another for him to corner our gas, our coal, our spectrum, our iron ore or whatever. Allow industrialists to do this and you will end up with a new league of super-businessmen, not unlike Russia’s oligarchs who nobody can ever touch and who become laws unto themselves.

Admit it: you agree with what you’ve read thus far. Admit, too, that you’ve read it without prejudice or a preconceived notion of where this article is headed – you’ve essentially read the words for what they are worth. No innuendo-laced curtains thrashing under the sentences have flapped in your face; there’s been no reading between the lines, no gauging or compartmentalising. These words have more or less echoed your feelings, the feelings of a billion of us.

Now let me admit to something: not a single sentence prior to the words “admit it” has been written by me. Not one!

At once, you’re wondering who the author could be. Through the scathing criticism and plucky analysis that is inherent in the writing, you’ve formed an opinion already regarding the identity. Could it be, you are thinking, Tavleen Singh – or is it Arundhati Roy?

Alright, it can’t be Tavleen because the tone isn’t quite the ottoman Prince Charles can sprawl his lower limbs on and clap for some Pimm’s, and it can’t be Ms Roy as the screen isn’t dripping with spittle.

So would it surprise you if I told you the author is none other than Vir Sanghvi, and the extract is taken from that very Counterpoint article of June 20, 2009 that brought his downfall?

I see that your blood pressure has shot up, your face has turned red, and your fingers are twitching like an addict’s to flog the keyboard so it ekes out the desired expletive.

Patience!

For this to work, it was important that I do away with quotation marks for the initial paragraph – or italicise it – as it would’ve alerted you. Yes, I dragged you by your wrist into a dark cave where you discovered a scroll and read it with an open mind. So lynch me!

And so the results of this cruel experiment are out, and they disclose something peculiar to human beings, namely, that when we read an article without knowing the identity of the author, we keep our prejudices at bay.

The silhouettes of Tavleen and Barkha, of Aakar and Swapan, are identical.

Hide the identity and we read the words for what they are. We don’t spot the author’s name and skip straight to the comments section.

There is comfort to be had in anonymity – for the writer as well as for the understanding reader. Anonymity is a choice available to every individual; it is his birthright. People forget it involves the voluntary subjugation of one’s ego – “All that acclaim could’ve been mine! Never mind, aye.” It also protects an individual if he fears State retribution or reprisals. It’s a legitimate, at times necessary recourse. But should a gigantic news organisation, whose primary purpose is to reveal the truth – and for whom State retribution isn’t a threat – use it?

Every Sunday an anonymous writer fills the exact space that was vacated unceremoniously by Vir’s Counterpoint column in Hindustan Times three years ago. I say anonymous because Chanakya – the author of the column – has been dead for thousands of years, and so this wily old fox must be someone else. Indeed, upon enquiry by Newslaundry, Ms Shobhana Bhartia, Editorial Director of Hindustan Times disclosed Chanakya’s identity – it is not one individual but rather a team of columnists who take turns every Sunday!

Now there’s no reason for a dead man to snatch credit from a living and breathing specimen when usually it’s the other way round, but I suppose it is the writer’s and his editor’s prerogative to decide on issues of anonymity.

What is crucial, however, is for Chanakya to take responsibility for his ideas and opinions. Chanakya may be dead but he is accountable, plain and simple – and so long as this is understood, the question of anonymity is secondary. The Economist, for example, never discloses the identity of any of its reporters and columnists. Who trusts their writers when they go job-hopping, is what I’d like to know.

APPLICANT: Sir, I write for The Economist.

INTERVIEWER: All well and good, but how do we know which article is yours, or whether it was admired or vilified?

APPLICANT: Sir, as I said, I write for The Economist. It doesn’t matter who wrote what. The magazine was praised for it – that is what is important.

INTERVIEWER: You’re hired!

There is something much more important than the issue of anonymity and it is this: how do we know that columns in general aren’t planted or influenced by interested parties?

The Radiatape scandal hurt Vir Sanghvi more than most, I imagine, for the simple reason that consumers of the written word are more eagle-eyed, more sensitive, and more loyal than consumers of the visual medium. They may be much less in number compared to news channel aficionados but week-on-week they collect dutifully under the columnist’s window and pluck strings of gratitude, or gather stones from the ground as the case may be.

People dipped into Vir and I was one among them. I may not have cared to learn how best to transport a suitcase full of asparagus through Customs, or how utterly obnoxious was the way our coalitions functioned, but Vir’s columns on Politics and Food were digested dutifully every Sunday.

Then came Radiatape and everything changed.

In one of the conversations, Vir asks Ms Radia about the kind of story she’d want for his Counterpoint column of June 20, 2009 (reproduced in part above). It does Ms Radia’s reputation no harm to think that the paragraph I’ve extracted from her “story” shows so much concern and anxiety for mother India!

On a serious note, all this was as damning as it gets. The Counterpoint column was suspended and Vir restricted to writing about matters concerning food and hotels. But now, perversely, I find that I cannot bring myself to read his Rude Food columns any more. They had always acted as mere accompaniments to his political columns, like a magician’s patter before he makes a train vanish. While reading Rude Food, instead of an exquisitely photographed quiche or a dumpling of smoked goat cheese on a bed of rocket leaves I envision a tombstone with the etching: “Here lies Vir Sanghvi, a sharp mind who wrote on anything and everything, with the sort of ease a blind Michelin chef might roll chapatis with.”

Then, late 2011, Vir wrote a rebuttal in Outlook where he described in much detail how his share of the Radiatape gold-dust was doctored. The Indian media, though, wasn’t approving of Vir’s efforts to clear his name. Hartosh Singh Bal, that smiling assassin from Open, who had earlier been scathing of Vir thought little of Vir’s Outlook assertion.

Vir’s claims, said Bal, “defy common sense. The tape in question does not stand alone, the details of his conversations are borne out by other conversations that do not involve Sanghvi, which in turn are corroborated by other tapes. In effect, his tape could have been doctored only if tens of hours of recording involving dozens of people was doctored.”

Bal has a point here and I wonder why Vir didn’t act on this: verify whether all the tapes in which his name appears are also doctored. It would’ve been as easy as sending the Outlook samples of these conversations over to the experts – something that he did for his own conversation with Ms Radia in any case. For example, in one conversation that Ms Radia has with her colleague Manoj Warrior, the latter compliments Vir’s Counterpoint article of June 20, 2009, and Ms. Radia replies:

RADIA: It’s a good article. I think it gets the message to the audience that we wanted to get to, haina?

MANOJ: I am just downloading the text, I am cut pasting it because-

RADIA: Ummmm, okay, okay I can’t see it, not…I can’t see…where does he say that one person, thing, oh yeah, it is one thing for an industrialist to…yeah, yeah.

MANOJ: Yeah, yeah, likha hai, boss. Verbatim.

RADIA: [Reads out this passage from Vir Sanghvi’s article fast]: It’s one thing for an industrialist to pay off a politician to build a factory; quite another for him to corner our gas, our coal, our spectrum, our iron ore or whatever. [Laughs]

And this is how seeds of suspicion are sown in the minds of unsuspecting readers.

When Vir wrote on national loot and oligarchic industrialists, no one thought it was at the behest of someone, or worse, trying to help out a particular industrialist. Radiagate changed all that.

Madhu Trehan, in one of her interviews on Newslaundry, lamented the fall in media standards: “When people read a newspaper nowadays, one part of their brain is constantly thinking: is this paid-news, is this planted?”

A case in point is Mr Shekhar Gupta’s recent article, where he scolds the government for harassing Mr. Sunil Mittal for an alleged wrongdoing he committed 15 years ago (National Interest: Crony, crawly capitalism, Indian Express, April 13, 2013). Again, much of it voices the concerns of a billion of us and its urgency and hard-hitting style cannot be faulted – in fact it is to be applauded. So far so good.

Now read the last paragraph of his article – reproduced below, where Mr Gupta concludes on his disclosure that, moved by the Prime Minister’s appeal for corporate social responsibility a few years back, Mr Mittal was first off the blocks, donating Rs 4 crore from his salary towards the education of underprivileged children: 

You want to know what the government has sent him, instead? They have now hit him and his globally admired company with the most ridiculously vindictive criminal litigation for something that is alleged to have happened 15 years ago. And nobody among his corporate peers is willing to speak up for him in public. Now you know what we mean when we say Indian capitalism has not yet come of age. This is what you expect in a world of the super-rich, where the only ideology is every-man-for-himself, and the sarkar is still the eternal mai-baap.

Mr. Gupta comes to the defence of Mr. Mittal even as the Supreme Court has taken cognisance of the matter based on an affidavit filed by the CBI. Furthermore, as many as two judges have recused themselves from proceedings already without providing any reason for doing so.

To be sure, there’s no reason not to believe Mr Gupta’s fine intentions – and no one can doubt the fact that Mr Mittal’s company is one of the few globally admired multinationals to have come out of India – but that June 20, 2009 Counterpoint article has ruined it all. A little like the no-ball fixing scandal involving some Pakistani players a few years ago, with the result that now, a foot or two beyond the popping crease – howsoever accidental or unintentional – and the hills come alive…

Newspapers should run on trust not advertisements, and it helps no one to have their readers on a constant vigil. This isn’t a bird-watching excursion.

It is immaterial whether Chanakya continues to write his Sunday column or puts in his papers and returns to his counselling duties at Patliputra. What is important is that readers trust him.