‘TV news full of non-issues. So, we don’t think’

S.M.A. Kazmi, the Urdu and Persian journalist arrested in February 2012 for his alleged involvement in the attack on an Israeli embassy vehicle, and released on bail eight months later, is set to launch an Urdu daily titled Quami Salamati (national security).

In an interview in the latest issue of Tehelka magazine, Kazmi answers what is now a standard question for journalists held and released on “terror” charges:

What is your view of the current state of journalism in India?

The media, both in India and other countries, is full of non-issues to keep people from thinking. In India, we sit in front of TV news channels for hours without having heard any news. At least a Doordarshan or an AIR bulletin gives out information. There is a set of journalists I call ‘poultry eggs’. They do stories the way editors tell them to. Reading newspapers in custody, though, I still have hope for the print media. It is more responsible.

Photograph: courtesy Tehelka

Read the full interview: ‘My arrest was psychological warfare’

Also read: Nine lessons a terror-suspect journo learnt in jail

Thankfully, TOI calls S.M.A Kazmi a journalist

S. M. A. Kazmi, the Urdu and Persian language journalist arrested in March this year for his alleged involvement in the attack on the car of an Israeli embassy official in New Delhi in February, has been ordered by the Supreme Court of India to be released after seven long months in custody.

Not surprisingly, there is great cheer in the Kazmi family.

His son Turab, is quoted by the Hindustan Times as saying:

“The first call I made was to my mother who started crying over the phone when I gave her the good news. We are very happy because the truth is out and justice has been finally done. We want to thank the Almighty for giving us power to fight for injustice.”

Kazmi’s wife, Jahan Ara, is quoted by the Indian Express as saying:

“Ibadat mein hi time guzra hai in saat mahino mein. Humare liye aaj hi eid hai (These seven months have been spent in prayers. Today is Eid for us).”

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However, behind the good news are signs of a sad and devious police plot.

Initially, many in the media merely doubted the police version of Kazmi’s alleged role in the attack. Now, it appears as if sections of the media are parroting the Delhi police version which doubts his very credentials as a journalist.

Kazmi read news for state-owned Doordarshan Urdu and did work for Radio Teheran  and covered the Gulf War. But news reports carrying the SC order, citing the Delhi police, are revealing.

Press Trust of India (PTI):

“Kazmi, who claims to have been writing for an Iranian publication, was picked up after a probe showed that he had been in touch with the suspect who is believed to have stuck the magnetic bomb on Israeli diplomat Tal Yehoshua’s car on February 13, according to the police.”

Hindustan Times correspondent:

“Kazmi, who claims to have been writing for an Iranian publication before his arrest in the case, was picked up after Delhi police investigation showed he had been in touch with the suspect who is believed to have stuck the magnetic bomb on Israeli diplomat Tal Yehoshua‘s car on February 13 this year, police said.”

The Indian Express quotes the court:

“The court said Kazmi, who claims to have been writing for an Iranian publication, has acquired his statutory right to bail on July 17.”

Thankfully, The Times of India bucks the trend:

“The Supreme Court on Friday granted bail to Syed Mohammad Ahmed Kazmi, a journalist who has been behind bars since March 6 in the Israeli diplomat car attack case.”

Image: courtesy Hindustan Times

Also read: Let the record show, Kazmi is not forgotten

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External reading: Eid comes early for Kazmi family: The Indian Express

Tehelka: Is there a case against Kazmi?

Tarun Sehrawat: 22, and killed in the line of duty

sans serif records with regret the passing away of Tehelka photographer Tarun Sehrawat after contracting malaria while working on a story in the Maoist-controlled areas of Chhattisgarh. He was 22 years old.

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The Hindu‘s Aman Sethi pays tribute:

“Today, when one of our own has been irrevocably lost, I feel we — as reporters, photographers and editors — must turn our gaze inwards and ask ourselves why a 22-year-old photographer with access to the best health care in the country, was claimed by a disease that was demystified in 1897….

“India’s journalists tend to nurse a healthy disregard for institutionalised frameworks, arguing that it is impossible to take all risks into account. But a few basic measures could help eliminate entirely predictable and avoidable tragedies like the one that claimed Tarun.

“It is the responsibility of senior editors to assess the risks that junior, inexperienced journalists take in search of a story. It isn’t enough to tell a 22-year- old like Tarun to ‘Be Careful.’ An organisation should be in a position to direct its journalists to information on possible health hazards and the corresponding vaccinations, inoculations and precautions.

“Reporters working out of conflict zones need specific training; all of us in Chhattisgarh operate in the hope that “everything will be okay,” but sometimes that isn’t enough.”

Read the full article: Remembering Tarun

Also read: Salute to a friend and colleague

Hellishness of others’ lives

Swamy and his media friends (and enemies)

In the latest issue of Tehelka magazine, Ashok Malik has a profile of the “irrepressible” Subramanian Swamy, the maverick economist-politician behind the 2G spectrum allocation scam.

The profile is occasioned by Harvard University’s recent decision to not renew Swamy’s teaching contract for a venomous column in DNA in July on “How to wipe out Islamic terror“:

“There’s an old story about Subramanian Swamy that even if apocryphal and probably untrue still merits retelling simply because it’s part of urban folklore in Lutyens’ Delhi.

“One day, a powerful editor with a blackmailing tendency walked into Swamy’s basement office in his south Delhi residence, and threw a sheaf of papers on the table.

“‘Dr Swamy,’ he thundered, ‘I have a file on you.’

“Unperturbed, Swamy reached out for a folder in his bottom drawer, placed them on the desk and said, calmly, with the chilling certitude so typical of his voice, ‘Mr Editor, I have a file on you’.”

Swamy, who is currently seeking to re-enter Parliament through the BJP, brought down the Atal Behari Vajpayee government in 1998 by getting arch-rivals Sonia Gandhi and Jayalalitha to drink tea together; another matter of course that Sonia is now a prime target of Swamy and Jayalalitha’s recent court appearances are based on a Swamy plea.

“At the end of the day, Swamy is trusted by few but ignored by even fewer. He can plug into extremely diverse social groups — serious economists, the loony right, the Janata parivar, the TamBrahm fraternity. He can hold both Ram Setu and N. Ram [the Marxist editor-in-chief of The Hindu] close to his heart (or profess to).

“For all his right-wing politics, the Hindu has been a loyal platform and publisher. His dogs have come from N. Ram’s litter, as indeed have Sonia Gandhi’s dogs — but that’s another contradiction, for Swamy to spin another day.”

Elsewhere, Swamy becoming persona non grata for Harvard thanks to his newspaper columns provides occasion for James Fallows, the national correspondent of The Atlantic Monthly, to recount the role played by Swamy in his getting into journalism:

“In the late 1960s, I had been a freshman at Harvard, ready to study around the clock in preparation for medical school. To earn extra money I had signed up as an ad salesman for the Crimson, and during the unbelievably bleak and frigid January “reading period” of my sophomore year, I was in the newspaper’s office one night, laying out an ad dummy for the next day’s paper.

“All the regular writers and editors were gone, cramming before final exams to make up for the courses they had skipped through the semester. So when a variety of fire alarms and sirens started going off, for what proved to be a big fire at the Economics Department building, I was the one on hand to run out after grabbing a camera and a reporter’s notebook.

“I had seen snow only once in my life before going to college; and in my high school jobs, manning smudge pots in the local Southern California orange groves on “cold” nights, we would trade tales about whether human beings could actually survive exposure to temperatures that dipped below 32F. But at the Economics Department, it was so cold — well below 0 F back in those pre-warming days — that the Cambridge Fire Department had trouble putting out the fire: water from the hoses would freeze in the air.

“I saw an upset-looking gentleman alongside me watching the fire. I asked why he was there. He said that all the notes and research for his current book, inside that building, was literally going up in smoke. That was Subramanian Swamy, then a young economics instructor. I wrote up his story in the paper — my first story for the Crimson, and the beginning of my shift from the ad staff (and pre-med) to the news staff.”

Let the record show that Swamy’s daughter Suhasini Haidar is a journalist with CNN-IBN; his sister-in-law Coomi Kapoor is a consulting editor with the Indian Express as is her husband Virendra Kapoor, a former editor of the Free Press Journal.

Let the record also show that James Fallows had narrated this story in 1996 at a commencement address at the Meddill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Photograph: courtesy Shailendra Pandey/ Tehelka

Also read: Does Swamy‘s DNA column amount to incitement?

Is UPA hitting back at TOI, India Today, DNA?

Swamy & friends: a very, very short story

Vir Sanghvi says his HT column will resume soon

After gripping the nation’s attention for nearly a year, the Niira Radia tapes that brought the politics-business-media nexus into sharp focus, is now on a slow but screechy rewind.

The lobbyist Radia has shut shop; arrested politicians (Kanimozhi) are on the way out of jail; the corporate bosses and business executives have secured bail; the government is busy reassessing the quantum of the scam (from Rs 173,000 crore to zero-loss to something more agreeable) and the case goes on.

Now, Vir Sanghvi, the former editor of the Hindustan Times, who “suspended” his weekly column in the Delhi paper and was redesignated “Advisor, HT Media” instead of “Advisory Editorial Director, HT Media”, after he was caught in conversations with Radia, claims he is on the way to resurrecting his “Counterpoint”.

In an interview with Revati Laul of Tehelka magazine (after a two-page column in Outlook* magazine and an appearance on NDTV to tout his innocence after forensic labs apparently certified that the tapes containing his voice were faked), Sanghvi claims he now stands vindicated:

Why did you feel the need to withdraw the column and from political journalism?
Because the allegation was that I was hand-in- glove with the Congress and that I was willing to offer Counterpoint to industrialists who wanted me to write things about them. These were damaging allegations. There are two ways to react to it. One is to say they are fake and I will ignore them. Or there’s my way. Which is to say they are fake and until I can prove they are fake, I will not do anything because I think it’s only reasonable that I go away and prove my innocence. I took the second approach.

Are you going to revive the column?
Yeah. Once I finish shooting the two television shows I’m working on.

For the record, HT replaced Sanghvi’s column in the same slot with a column bylined Chanakya six months after he “suspended” his.

* Disclosures apply

Photograph: courtesy Hindu Business Line

Read the full interview: ‘I have been vindicated’

Also read: Scribe says tribe crossed line in Radia tapes

Vir Sanghvi & Barkha Dutt: “We were targetted”

HT strips Vir Sanghvi of editorial advisory role

Vir Sanghvi “suspends” Hindustan Times column

2011 Sanskriti Award for Tehelka’s Rana Ayyub

Rana Ayyub, a Bombay-based assistant editor with Tehelka magazine, is among the five recipients of this year’s Sanskriti Awards. The awards were presented in New Delhi on Friday, November 18.

In her seven-year career in journalism, Rana, 28, a postgraduate in social communications media, has reported from the naxal hotbeds and the warlands of the LTTE in Sri Lanka.

A press release says Rana has to her credit revelational exposes on rightwing fundamentalism and conflict and terror related reports in the country. “She considers her work on the arrest of innocent Dalit teenagers under terror acts in the naxal infested areas of Maharashtra as perhaps the most riveting and thought provoking pieces.”

Photograph: Rana Ayyub (fourth from right) at the presentation of the Sanskriti Awards, with former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (second from left) and other winners, in New Delhi on November 18, 2011

Also read: Aman Sethi bags Red Cross journalism prize

EPW journalist bags Appan Menon award

Rema Nagarajan of ToI bags Nieman fellowship

Mint‘s Monika Halan among Yale fellows

Chameli Devi prize for Tehelka scribe, K.K. Shahina

Pallava Bagla bags ‘Oscar’ of science journalism

Saikat Datta bags prize for using RTI for story

India-China friendship award for Pallavi Aiyar

Knight fellowship for Frontline’s Dionne Bunsha

NYT, WSJ weigh in on Tehelka’s Goa controversy

The controversy surrounding Tehelka magazine’s Goa conference, ThinkFest, had so far been largely confined to sections of blogosphere, which used an editorial page piece in Hindustan Times by the theatreperson Hartman de Souza, and Tehelka editor Tarun J. Tejpal‘s response to it, as a trigger.

Only Deccan Herald among the large English dailies gave any play to the kerfuffle kicked up by remarks reportedly made by Tejpal at the end of the first day of the conference, that since they were in Goa, they could eat, drink, be merry and “sleep with whomever you want.” (Also see “Crusader turns Collector“)

Possibly because Tehelka‘s conference had international backers in Tina Brown‘s Newsweek and its sister website, The Daily Beast, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have both found the controversy over the location and sponsorship juicy enough to put out stories today.

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Lydia Polgreen in NYT:

The slick and well-attended conference led some in the Twitterverse and blogosphere to wonder: had Tehelka sold out to India’s mining barons and real estate tycoons?

The festival was sponsored by some of India’s top corporations and held at a hotel allegedly owned by men in jail awaiting charges involving the 2G telecommunications scam.

Potentially even more damaging, Tehelka faced accusations that it withheld an investigative story about illegal mining in Goa in exchange for the Goa state government’s support for the festival, an allegation the magazine’s editors strenuously deny. A version of the article was later published by Firstpost, a news Web site….

Tarun J. Tejpal, Tehelka’s editor, said that he was unaware of who owned the hotel or any environmental violations in its construction when his staff scouted the location months ago.

“When we looked for a hotel that could accommodate the scale we wanted, we couldn’t find a single hotel that could find a hall that could accommodate 600 to 700 people,” until they found the Grand Hyatt, which was still under construction. “Much later on the virtual eve of the fest we began to hear of these other issues.”

By then it was too late to shift to another location, he said.

Essar, one of the corporations sponsoring the festival, runs huge mines in Chhatisgarh and elsewhere, and some press critics have accused Tehelka of softening its criticism of the mining giant in exchange for sponsorship.

Tejpal flatly denied this, and said it was spurious to claim that his magazine’s journalism was somehow suspect, arguing that no publication has done more to highlight the plight of India’s dispossessed than Tehelkha, which frequently runs exposés of corporate and political misdeeds.

“There is a kind of absurdity for these arguments,” Tejpal fumed. “At the end of the day, by that count, virtually everything in India is suspect.”

Lucy Archibald in the WSJ:

However, some of the controversy merits a closer look. Most contentiously, writing in the Hindustan Times, Hartman De Souza, the sexagenarian theatre veteran and activist, accused the Tehelka editor of compromising a story about Goa’s illegal mining in order to get a green light for the festival.

According to De Souza, Tehelka reporter Raman Kirpal visited the state in March and discovered the illegal mining of iron ore at several times the environmentally cleared rate. This allegedly amounted to an illegal profit of Rs 8 billion ($163.5 million). Subsequently, the state-appointed Public Accounts Committee reportedly put the figure lost by the state exchequer closer to Rs 3,000 crore.

De Souza contends that Tejpal delayed the publication of the story just when he was in talks with Goa’s Chief Minister Digambar Kamat about approval and sponsorship for the event. And so far no such story on Goa’s illegal mining has run in Tehelka.

The reporter has since left the magazine and published his story on Firstpost.com, where he has now taken up a staff position. Coverage of the mining scandal followed in various local media outlets.

Several Goan government officials, including Kamat, were allegedly castigated in the committee’s report…. As a result of all this, De Souza objects to the inclusion of the Goan government as a sponsor of the ThinkFest event.

Tejpal published a strong riposte pointing out that the reporter in question was fired by Tehelka “on account of poor performance.” He strongly rejected De Souza’s version of events, calling his article “bizarre and baseless” and its author “full of rage at the world, but no facts.”

He also pointed out that they “actively refused sponsorship from all the Goan mining companies.” The festival was partly sponsored by companies including Aircel, Essar and Tata Steel.

Photograph: courtesy Newsweek

Also read: A magazine, a scam, an owner and his Goan house

Tarun J. Tejpal: “We haven’t bent or violated any rule”

Tarun Tejpal: Haven’t violated or bent any rules

Although he wasn’t named in the original piece by Hartman de Souza in the Hindustan Times, Tarun J. Tejpal, the editor of Tehelka, offers a spirited defence in today’s paper on the alleged irregularities in his under-construction house in Goa:

“When I tell him [Hartman de Souza] the reporter he has cited was asked to leave the magazine on account of poor performance, he rages that the world will soon run out of water and power and food (and love).

“When I tell him we don’t do mining, our investors don’t do mining, I have no friends who are mining barons, and that we actively refused sponsorship from all the Goan mining companies for our Think conclave, he rages that all mining is bad, everywhere….

“I don’t tell him that our journalists have in the last few years done more work than anyone else against land and mining violations in Orissa, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Karnataka, Haryana and other states. I suspect for him if it isn’t in Goa it doesn’t count.

“I don’t tell him that Tehelka’s public interest journalism ends up in crucial PILs, Supreme Court mandated special institutional tribunals (SITs), and impacts policy on a myriad human rights issues on a regular basis. I suspect, for him if it isn’t in Goa it doesn’t count.

“I don’t tell him I go to the courts several times every month to defend ourselves against those whose wrongdoings we’ve exposed. I suspect, for him if it isn’t Goa it doesn’t count.

“I don’t tell him that if the top 100 media editors and owners declare their assets I would be delighted, if included, to declare mine. Such revelations might explode his rage to potentially fatal levels.”

Read the full article: Albert Pinto ko gussa kyon aata hai?

Also read: A magazine, a scam, an owner and his Goan house

Tehelka promoter’s woes just don’t seem to end

Moneybag MP says he didn’t turn off FW tap

A magazine, a scam, an owner & his Goan house

Be it the Commonwealth Games scam, the 2G spectrum allocation scam, or the demolition of Team Anna, it is increasingly clear that sections of the media are eagerly running with the wolves and hunting with the hounds.

In State after State, in story after story, media houses, owners and professionals are turning out to be players in the very stories they are supposed to be purveying, making nonsense of issues such as integrity, conflict of interest, and crossmedia ownership.

The unravelling mining scams in Karnataka and Goa are no exceptions.

In today’s Hindustan Times, the veteran theatreperson Hartman de Souza writes these telling paragraphs why it took so long for the Goan mining scam to see the light of day:

“The story that broke the skullduggery in Goa first appeared on Firstpost. Later, it was methodically pursued by reporters from Hindustan Times’ Mumbai bureau.

“But what many people don’t know is that the Firstpost story was first commissioned when the reporter concerned was working for another magazine*, which takes pride in being politically neutral.

“The story remained in limbo for two weeks. It saw the light of day only when the reporter left the organisation, took the story with him, made one more trip to Goa and uncovered some more irregularities.

“Environmentalists in Goa were, however, not puzzled by the said magazine’s reluctance to go after the Goa government and its home-grown mining barons, given that it had sent a reporter earlier and had blocked that story then too.

“The magazine’s proprietor had bought an old house in a Goan village. Even as I write this, he is bending rules to get the house refurbished into a new age spa. Just across the house was an old jackfruit tree, which was cut even when the inside of its thick turmeric-coloured centre was still gleaming with moisture.

“It’s anybody’s guess how many more old trees would have been cut inside the vast perimeter of the property to make way for lawns, garden and ponds. It doesn’t end there. The said magazine* will soon hold an ‘ideas’ jamboree in Panjim at a hotel which is owned by a mining company.”

Photograph: courtesy Hindustan Times

Read the full article: You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours

External reading: Everybody loves a good war

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* Disclosures apply

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Also read: Tehelka promoter’s woes just don’t seem to end

Moneybag MP says he didn’t turn off FW tap

Should media corruption come under Lokpal?

‘Editors are lobbying on behalf of corporations’

Media houses are sitting on plots leased at one rupee!

‘Editors, senior journalists must declare assets’

Aman Sethi bags Red Cross journalism prize

Aman Sethi, The Hindu‘s correspondent in Chhattisgarh, has bagged the international red cross committee’s award for best print media article on humanitarian issues, for his March 2011 piece on homes and granaries that were torched by police commandos in three villages in the Naxal heartland.

Tehelka ‘s Umar Baba took the second place, while the third prize went to Reji Joseph of Rashtra Deepika. The consolation prize went to Anup Sharma of The Times of India .

Bombay-born Sethi, who studied business journalism at Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism, worked for the Hindu‘s sister publication, Frontline, before being posted to Chhattisgarh. His debut book “A Free Man“, an account of the life of a homeless, migrant labourer was published recently.

Read the award-winning piece: The Hindu

Read an excerpt from his book: Caravan

Read Aman Sethi’s articles: Kafila

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Also read: EPW journalist bags Appan Menon award

Rema Nagarajan of ToI bags Nieman fellowship

Mint‘s Monika Halan among Yale fellows

Chameli Devi prize for Tehelka scribe, K.K. Shahina

Pallava Bagla bags ‘Oscar’ of science journalism

Saikat Datta bags prize for using RTI for story

India-China friendship award for Pallavi Aiyar

Knight fellowship for Frontline’s Dionne Bunsha