Among the many things we have retained for the love of our past in India is a Soviet system of information control and dissemination, which means the government maintains an elaborate machinery called the ministry of information of broadcasting whose essential business is to restrict information the government does not want broadcast.

It is also the business of this ministry to circulate the establishment's claims as achievements. In addition to this Soviet information order, there exists in India today a flourishing public relations and promotions complex that is for anyone to hire for a price.

They are employed by politicians, political parties, corporate businesses, individual entrepreneurs and, increasingly, by the government itself. The media is under a dual barrage of advertisement masquerading as information.

Where does the journalist fit into this blissful marriage between the socialist behemoth and the free market shark?

Pampered lapdog

The temptation to become a pampered lapdog on the honeymoon couch is substantial and I daresay many have submitted to that seduction.

That pelf-scented couch is indeed a cosy place, frilled out by the concessions the government might be ready to grant in lieu of silence or worse, feathered by the goodies the market is only too eager to provide in celebration of complicities.
But India isn't a cosy place, not for the bulk of those who populate it at any rate. It is a hard, grinding, disparity-ridden place where the majority exists at the bottom of a downward spiral.

India might have sent out big-picture images of itself as an exemplar among post-colonial democracies - a flourishing multiplicity of peoples, a raring economy, a stable of the best IT thoroughbreds, a defiant nuclear power knocking hard at the doors of the UN Security Council. All of that is true of the country I come from. But what I am about to say is just as true.

We are a nation still ravaged by tribal and communal wars, daily caste feuding, recurrent bloodletting between Hindus and Muslims in the main. Most Indians still live beneath what we call the poverty line, an invisible, though merciless creature that describes a life of insufficient single meals and, often, no clothing or housing. A huge number of those people also happen to be at the wrong end of social discrimination instituted by our age-old caste system.

For all our ambassadors of excellence in universities across the world, we remain a hugely illiterate people. We are a nuclear power but we do not have enough electricity to power even showpiece metros like New Delhi and Bombay. What is true of five percent of India and Indians is not true of the rest of India and Indians.

India is many people. And I do not speak of the plurality of religion, tongue, culture and ethnicity alone. I speak of the plurality of time. You leave New Delhi or Bombay and you are in the towns of yesterday.

You venture a little farther and you are in the villages of the day before, lodged in a hapless time warp. It is a complex place and reporting India requires complex approaches and methods. The concerns of the Indian media cannot be the concerns of the big city alone. They cannot be the concerns of the playing fields of the newly arrived market.

For the journalist to turn a cosy lapdog in India is not merely anachronistic, it is derelict and deeply alarming. A car launch or a fashion parade cannot make front-page news when a raging drought in some corner of the country is relegated to inner columns not burdened with feel good advertising.

'Shining India'

Perhaps the most blunt example in recent times of how deeply divorced mainstream Indian media has become from the reality of the territory it reports was the general election of 2004. The government of the day, led by the right-wing chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party ran a multi-million, multi-media campaign it called 'Shining India'.

In six years, the campaign claimed, these self-appointed knights in shining armour had transformed the face of India - farmers were wielding cellphones, milkmen were driving pickups, the underclasses were slurping cream, the middleclass was bathing in honey, rural India was a pastoral symphony, urban India was a leap of lightning. The media was in thrall. It believed Shining India more than its authors did.

Scarcely anyone foresaw the defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The fact is you didn't have to be a soothsayer to see what a rude joke Shining India was for most of the people who voted in that election.

And it is not as if the Indian media - print or television - lacked the talent to see or interpret what was about to happen. It was, quite simply, was not bothered to find out because it did not think that necessary. Profits in a consumerist market - such as India is becoming more and more - are not always linked to the truth; often, they steer you very far from realities.

The means to curtail and contain media freedom have become far more subtle in our world and my case as an Indian journalist is that the media itself has become a major party to this insidious process.

I am happy to report that despite what happened to Tehelka a few years ago, de jure and de facto arrangements to squash or subvert media freedoms, such as exist elsewhere on this continent, do not operate in India. But what does concern me is a sense that more and more the Indian media is not using
the freedoms it has won for itself. More and more, it is ready to abdicate its mandated role in a free society in the interests of buzzing cashtill.

The media is only too happy to collaborate in its co-option by the government and the market, so much so that the powers almost assume journalists to be their allies, if not adjuncts. Feudal, even imperial, mores are a genetic flaw with our governments; they work on a system of rewards, dropping crumbs from the table and opening access to those that rush to pick them up - junkets abroad, wine and cheese parties, a harmless little exclusive story, an appointment that your peers will not get.

All these on the condition that the story the government does not want told shall not be told. We are, more and more, part of such convivial clubs. We have bartered away the essence of our calling for the seductions of an exaggerated, if altogether false, sense of power. We have allowed ourselves to be sucked in by the establishment and our ways. We know the inside story but we have become so much the insiders ourselves that we will not tell the story.

We revel in carrying secret messages from this politician to that, not in revealing those messages. We are no longer content being reporters reporting on games people play; we want to become players ourselves. We do not want to be in the press gallery of Parliament, we aspire to sit in the House of Parliament.

Feel-good reporting

There was a time a journalist's worth was measured by how much awe he inspired in the establishment. Today, journalistic stature is about how much part of the establishment you are. Partisanship, in its narrowest sense, isn't a vice that stains journalistic careers, it is a certificate of virtue. It's price is our vocation itself.

A lot is heard today about what is called feel-good reporting - devoting space to good news, product launches, galas, glamour, the lives of the rich and beautiful people. It's a consumptive profit exercise between the media and the market. Feel good advertising does not sit nicely with bad news on the front-pages. And yet the dangers of getting caught in that delusory loop in a country like India cannot be overstated.

To insulate 10 percent of the nation - and that is roughly what the mainline newspaper reading public in India would constitute - from how 90 percent of the population lives is an urgent invitation to problems.

Dumbing down is often justified in Indian newsrooms in the name of what the reader wants. I have a few problems with that. I am yet to come across a good enough barometer on reader likes and dislikes. I think it safe to assume, interests vary hugely.

And I am certainly not convinced today's reader has become a moronic entertainment junky who needs a daily fix of good news and glamour. That means to me insulting the intelligence of the reader.

Besides, reader interest and that alone cannot be the arbiter of what we as journalists engage in, especially in semi-literate, developing societies. The burden of disseminating information and creating bridges of communication between the rulers and the ruled, between the classes and the underclasses, between one region and another, is a burden the media must bear.

The Tehelka experience

The experience of Tehelka, the newspaper I work for, has proved that there exists a hunger for what is increasingly old-fashioned journalism, driven by a spirit of enquiry rather than a mood of lazy complicity.

I am sure most of you are familiar with the Tehelka story but the broad frame of it bears repetition.

Tehelka, then only a news portal, conducted a sting operation called Westend exposing corruption in defence deals in 2001. The expose shook up the establishment, indeed the nation. The then defence minister had to resign and heads rolled in the army top brass as well.

But Tehelka too suffered hugely. Its offices were raided, its journalists and financiers were persecuted on false charges, the organisation itself was bled to the stage that it could not sustain itself any longer.

Tarun Tejpal editor in chief and the moving force behind Tehelka, spent the best part of three years getting cross questioned by an enquiry commission that would not, strangely, look into the corruption Tehelka had exposed.

But what the persecution of Tehelka did was create, almost overnight, a huge though amorphous support base for the brand name. Tehelka was soon being seen as a moral centre in a society gone cynical about corruption in high places and morality in leadership.

Tarun (right), addressed hundreds of meetings across the country over this period stressing the need for probity in public life and canvassing support for institutions that would perform watchdog roles. Three years later, Tehelka, the weekly newspaper was born, almost entirely funded by a unique public subscription drive.

People were ready to pay up for freedom and information, they invested heavily in a newspaper that they thought would give them more than dumbed down feel good news.

Tehelka is a year and a half now and the good news is it is growing with every issue. It remains largely funded by its subscribers. I am not about to make a case here for buccaneer, shoot-and-scoot journalism that many have, wrongly, come to associate with Tehelka. I cannot speak for Tarun Tejpal but I am confident I am not doing anything that contradicts his or the paper's position when I say that we are not a bomb factory hawking sensation.

We remain deeply committed to investigative journalism, done with pens and notebooks or, where it requires, the hidden camera. If we scent a stink, we will go after it, and we have done so. But what we do over our 30-odd pages is much more. We have a vigorous editorial section where some of the best names in the business write.

Our news and features pages bring to you menus that instantly define Tehelka as a newspaper with a different core and flavour. Our engaged circle is a cluster of pages devoted entirely to issues of public concern, of which there never remains any dearth in India. I invite you, ladies and gentlemen, to go to
www.tehelka.com to get a sense of the kind of journalism we do week after week.

I am not unaware of the fact that we exist, indeed must survive, in a market that makes demands. It is foolhardy to suggest mass circulation media outfits can survive without market support. But it is possible to do good, and profitable, journalism without kowtowing to the market in a manner that makes journalism a casualty.

It has not been an easy ride for us at Tehelka but we are today a robust, going concern. Our journalism remains deeply committed to issues of public importance. Our tools remain the tools of journalistic inquiry. Our quest remains the quest of truth and integrity. Our commitment remains a commitment to uncovering and disseminating information that people in a democracy must have access to.

SANKARSHAN THAKUR is executive editor of Tehelka. Tehelka, which began as an Internet website that rocked India with its investigative journalism, is now a weekly newspaper.