#HaftaLetters: A journalist’s thoughts post elections

Hi Newslaundry/Abhinandan,

I’m a journalist, long-time subscriber, , and this is my first email. I suspect it will be a long one. If you read excerpts from this email, please use only my initials.

First, an anecdote.

Most people do not like to stand for the national anthem before a film, and yet they do so, typically out of fear of “jhamela”. I’m like most people. When I stand for the national anthem, my thoughts are not of how wonderful our country is, though I do not doubt it is in some ways wonderful. Instead, I look around to guess who in the audience would beat me up if I didn’t stand. Over the last couple of years, I’ve found myself being increasingly suspicious of other people in the audience, not to mention, scared. When I stand, my thoughts are of fear and distrust. This is all in my head of course, but that does not mean it does not exist.

A few months ago I went to watch Captain Marvel. In the middle of an engaging scene, the theatre cut to the interval, as theatres in India often do with Hollywood films. It was a particularly thoughtless cut. The audience  let out a collective groan. And then, something miraculous happened. The projector had not yet been turned off, and a teenager in the last row stuck his finger into it. What flashed on the screen was a big, loud, middle finger. The audience clapped and cheered and laughed. It was the fuck you we all wanted. The divides in my head melted instantly. That silly, moronic, adolescent middle finger had united us like no national anthem ever had.

This election has made us distrustful of each other like no other, a fact you tacitly addressed at the end of the last Hafta. I’ve seen awful examples of this on social media. I’ve seen a Bengali voter (a liberal journalist at Indian Express, no less) refer to North Indians in Bengal as “cancerous”. I’ve seen people from Kerala say that they do not identify with the rest of the BJP-voting electorate and want to secede from India. Comedian Kunal Kamra said Fuck You to the Indian voter on results day. That fuck you came from real pain. The email you read last week on Hafta was heart-breaking. Everywhere I look there is distrust and fear. We believe we no longer understand each other.

I believe the media has played an enormous role in this. Pliant television media certainly, but even liberal media, which I hold to higher standards. The liberal media tells us again and again that to engage with the right, i.e the RSS and the like, is to legitimise and normalise it. And so liberal media has decided to alienate them altogether. (For example, Raghu Karnad stopped attending JLF because RSS members were invited.) We’ve painted the average BJP voter to be an bigoted, Muslim-lynching, saffron-wearing, fascist, when most people are just voting for the lesser evil. Our fights are over degrees of bad.

We seem to have forgotten that we have more in common than what separates us. We’ve forgotten that eventually we all suffer from the same insecurities, the same fears, the same heartbreaks, the same challenges. That we have to fight climate change, that we have to work towards education, health and sanitation for all, that we will all lose people we love to heart problems and cancer, that breakups hurt, back pain is inevitable, puppies adorable and gulab jamun amazing.

That’s where I see journalism, and NL in particular, playing a huge role in healing our hearts and reminding us that we’re all batting for the same team, regardless of worldview and politics. I highly recommend bringing back your interviews on I Agree, which was a fabulous product, and gave a tool to engage, without legitimising. (Find someone else to do it if not you!) I believe you should be bringing people with all kinds of politics to Hafta, more from the right than you currently do, and focussing on what you have in common as much as on where you differ. We have to work to see where we disagree, but also agree. We must humanise one another.

I’m so happy when I hear subscribers write to you and say that you’re bashing Modi too much; it means that Modi voters are listening and engaging! Why don’t you have more of them on your shows? I’m interested in their point of views, which we could then challenge and dissect as well.

No other news organisation, with the exception of maybe the Print, enjoys a bipartisan readership. You must build it and preserve it. Even if by playing the class clown, or the teenager with his middle finger in the projector.

(To this end, I think the World Cup is coming at a great time! There may be some value to cricket after all! Ha!)

Also, I’m keen for you guys to engage with this question: Should journalists be expressing their feelings about election results on social media? The question is not about liberty to do so, of course that exists. The question is does it undermine our work as journalists?

Best of luck, I have great hope from what you can do with limited means, and I hope I get to work with you someday.

SV