When truth is the first casualty

Jawed NaqviUpdated February 27, 2019 Facebook Count

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TRUTH they say is the first casualty in war, in some cases in peacetime too. How would the
media realistically know beside the official handout that there was a bombing of a target in
Balakot on Tuesday? Or, as the counter narrative went, how would anyone know that it was
merely an attempted bombing that misfired and that the Indian planes merely dropped their
payload randomly and fled?

But yelling and screaming TV anchors painted a picture in India of such precise details as though
they were watching everything from the cockpits of Mirage planes. Media is not always helpless
or bereft of resources to independently verify the truth. When the Pakistani government was in
denial that the Mumbai gunman captured alive was a Pakistani, it was the Pakistani media that
dug out the truth and showed Ajmal Kasab’s house and his relatives in a remote village of
Punjab.

In India, a journalist showed courage to challenge the official narrative, a rare event, and
reported how the Indian maritime security had blown up a suspected Pakistani dhow in the
Arabian Sea because it didn’t want to feed the arrested crew plates of biryani. It was difficult to
find a journalist on Tuesday on Indian TV who would be asking questions and scrutinising the
narrative from both sides instead of giving lectures in patriotism from the pulpit their newsroom
has become.

It was the rightwing leader L.K. Advani who captured the state of India’s mainstream media in his
memoirs. He recalled how when Indira Gandhi asked them to bend, the journalists preferred to
crawl. The questioning spirit is not absent, however.

And there are alternative news portals that offer an even-handed view of events. What can a
journalist do if the channels are owned by politically motivated businessmen? The questioning
spirit and sensible discussions are available on crowd-funded news portals by the very best in
the profession. Indian journalism is not dead.
Indian portals go against tide, question govt’s take

Where are the pictures of the attack on Balakot? One could have asked. The Mirage-2000 is
supposed to be the best choice for shooting pictures of its targets. One channel said the weather
was bad for taking pictures, another reported that the pictures were being processed.

Where was the simple old-fashioned Q&A with any serving government official, a military officer,
a minister or MP, as opposed to a familiar set of retired and angry army officials and rightwing
ideologues?

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in Seoul on Friday to receive a peace prize. On
Monday, he inaugurated a war memorial in Delhi, and on Tuesday he was proclaiming a precision
air strike on a Pakistani target though it was denied by Pakistan. There could have been a
stakeout at any of the three venues, because Pulwama had happened and the blood of the
soldiers was asking for an explanation. Indian Foreign Secretary Vijay Keshav Gokhale, who
helped resolve the 2017 Doklam standoff with China as ambassador in Beijing with credit, was
requisitioned to brief the media on the early morning incident. He gave the details of the
bombing (or payload dropping) as best as he could, but didn’t take a single question.

There’s a patriotic Indian movie called Uri, which Pakistanis should be allowed to see, because it
shows Indian commandoes as brave hearts and a Pakistani intelligence officer as a burping,
acidity-stricken bumbling man. Pakistanis should see it to measure it against what they make
Indians look like.

Words of caution that journalists are taught to lean on to improve their quality of reporting such
as “alleged”, “claimed”, “suspected” and so forth are missing these days. While Indian media
shunned the caution, not for the first time, The Guardian report on the alleged strike spoke of
Indian “claim”. In a brief, prepared statement, Mr Gokhale said at 11:30 am that the Indian target
was Jaish-e-Muhammad training camp at Balakot. He described the strike as “non-military pre-
emptive action” against the Jaish in the face of “credible intelligence” that the group was
preparing more fidayeen for terrorist strikes in India. He did not refer to the Indian Air Force or
use the term airstrike, describing what had happened merely as “an intelligence-led operation”
against a key Jaish facility. It was a professionally crafted statement for the media. Could the
media not have asked him to define how a “non-military pre-emptive action” was different from
a military one?

Was the Pulwama tragedy more compelling than the Kargil war for the warplanes to cross the
LOC for the first time since 1971?

Prime Minister Vajpayee was specifically opposed to such a transgression. There was this
channel on which a very popular woman anchor was describing the incident as having “called
Pakistan’s nuclear bluff”. It was like some batsman had sorted out the bowler’s troublesome
reverse swing. She was tamed by former Air Marshal R.K. Sharma, who told her she was wrong
and probably irresponsible to say that. It took a former air chief to remind the viewers that the
government should go for high-level diplomacy. But the pulpit will persist, come war, come
peace, with its own harangue, for compulsions that are hard to divine.

Published in Dawn, February 27th, 2019

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