Vexed Views

The recent dictum of the West Bengal government, led by Mamata Banerjee, to the public and state sponsored libraries not to subscribe to any newspaper but the eight (this figure has been revised later) has created a lot of furore. Banerjee is blamed for being partisan, an allegation she herself hurled against the Left Front, during her years of campaign which ultimately brought the Trinamool Congress to power. In his guest post for Stray Thoughts, veteran journalist Buroshiva Dasgupta looks at the complex relationship between the state and the media and reflects on how the political parties in West Bengal coax and compel the media for their own benefit.

In my days with The Statesman  (1977-86), I wrote few articles, which the Left Front, then the ruling formation in West Bengal, did not like at all. One of them was on the list which the Left Front government had prepared and sent to all public libraries as a guideline for book purchases. The list had several books written by Marx and Lenin and of several writers well known for their Marxist beliefs. Only two thin volumes of the greatest Bengali poet and thinker Rabindranath Tagore (one as far as I can remember now was Letters from Russia) was included in the list.

During the time, the Left was also trying to discontinue Tagore’s ‘Sahaj Path’, the children’s primer; from schools on the ground that Tagore was ‘feudal’. I wrote another article showing how wrong it was to describe Sahaj Path as ‘feudal’. Both the stories in The Statesman created quite a public uproar and we saw how finally the government had to retreat on their decisions, seek public apology and rectify. The lists used for library purchases had to be amended in the subsequent years and the plan to remove Sahaj Path from schools dropped.

Recently, Mamata Banerjee’s decision to dictate the public libraries buy only a handful of newspapers, who are loyal to the government and keep out the major ones who are critical makes me relive my past experience of the Left’s highhandedness.

Power is surely a corrupting influence. Banerjee was very friendly across the media when she was fighting the elections to defeat the Left. She even visited the office of Bartaman (one of the popular newspapers in Kolkata) and garlanded the portrait of its founder-editor Barun Sengupta immediately after the election results were published. She was extremely cordial with Star Ananda  – the television news channel of the Anandabazar Patrika (ABP) Group – and its anchors.

The channel covered initially almost every bit of her life from Kalighat home to the Writers’ Building, the state administrative headquarters. But when the media started becoming critical - first the Bartaman and then the ABP – she lost her temper. She boycotted Star Ananda and ordered all her ministers to boycott the channel. This boycott was followed by the Left Front government, once ABP’s honeymoon with Buddhadeb Bhattacharya was over.

Government’s handling of the media, one need to realise, is a specialised affair and it is not everybody’s cup of tea. Media does not exist just to write only about the ‘good work’ of the government; nor should the government think it that way. Media too is not clean enough - we have heard about the ‘paid news’ and about the lobbying of Neera Radia.

We have also seen for long the power wielded by party mouthpieces like the Ganashakti of the CPI (M) and now lately the Jago Bangla of the Trinamool Congress. But we don’t expect the frontline daily newspapers and channels to follow party lines. And that is what precisely Banerjee has charged the media of – to justify her stand of keeping out the major newspapers from the library purchase list.

All the frontline English newspapers are off the list. Are we to believe that these English language newspapers are all political? Even CNN and Fox News are sometimes accused of having rival political strings attached. But can you think of the US government boycotting them?

Dr Buroshiva Dasgupta is a veteran journalist, columnist and a media academic. He has been a practising journalist for over 25 years with major Indian newspapers like The Statesmen, The Times of India, The Economic Times, The Indian Express and The Financial Express. He writes extensively on politics, economy, environment, culture and contemporary Indian life. As a media academic he is associated with the Manipal Institute of Communication, the University of Asmara in Eritrea and many other Indian educational institutes of repute. He did his PhD on New Media and New Poetics: the changing interface from the Calcutta University, and is the founder-editor of the Indian Edition of the Global Media Journal. He has compiled a book named, ‘Market, Media and Democracy’.