When newsrooms were busy with the just-announced general election schedule on March 16, two forwards landed on my phone.
One was a video clip that showed Aroon Purie, chairman and editor-in-chief of the India Today Group, welcoming Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the media house’s conclave. Punctuated by roars of approval and applause from the audience, Purie reminded the prime minister that he (the editor-in-chief) had requested Modi at the same venue the year before to return this year too, which the prime minister fulfilled by breaking off an unfinished tour of South India just so that he could be at the India Today event in New Delhi.
Disclosing Modi’s plan to resume his tour the next day and describing it as “amazing”, Purie turned to the prime minister to express his deep gratitude and said, as the audience cheered: “Isko kehte hain, Modi ki guarantee.”
The other forward, separated by less than 10 minutes, was from a senior journalist based in New Delhi. The veteran journalist had sent a post on X by Dhanya Rajendran, editor-in-chief of The News Minute, a portal that focuses on ground reports and analysis from South India.
Rajendran’s post said: “A bunch of 25 journalists have been working together from day before (mid-March), with one purpose — to look at the electoral bond data. @thenewsminute already works with @newslaundry. @scroll_in’s @sharmasupriya and we spoke and thought why not work together. Then we pooled in around 10 independent journalists, people like @t_d_h_nair @FightAnand @parthpunter @nikita1712 @NeelMadhav_ @Orangutard and others. Most have never worked with each other, in fact many didn’t even know each other. But keeping aside all their doubts, this group of journalists came together to look at the bond data. We have published 9 stories till now and many many more are to come. Deep dives and quick stories. These journalists didn’t even ask whose byline will go, who will get credit etc, everyone just wanted to get the work done, to ensure that we look thru the data properly. Happy and proud to have been part of this initiative.”
“Isn’t this wonderful?” the senior journalist who sent me the forward messaged a little later.
Not merely wonderful, the moment marked a milestone in Indian journalism. Like most signature events, neither Purie’s comments nor the initiative by the journalists flagged by Rajendran unfolded overnight. Many leading players of the established media in India have been kowtowing to the government unabashedly for quite some time.
Similarly, The News Minute and Newslaundry, another portal that has been at the forefront of groundbreaking journalism, had collaborated in February to come up with outstanding reports on political funding by companies. (The February series focused on direct donations and contributions through trusts while the initiative in March dealt with the electoral bond disclosures the State Bank of India made in the Supreme Court.)
However, the way in which the two forwards on the two editors-in-chief almost crossed their paths tells a story that traces its roots to the post-Emergency golden age of English journalism in India.
In the 1980s, The Illustrated Weekly of India, then edited by Pritish Nandy, carried a cover story under the evocative headline, “The Typewriter Guerrillas”. The headline was reminiscent of the title of the 1977 book that profiled 20 top investigative journalists, including Jack Anderson, who exposed the understanding between the United States of America and Pakistan during the 1971 war, and Carl Bernstein, part of the Watergate reporter duo.
The Weekly’s report chronicled a then-unfamiliar face of English journalism in India: young, brash, iconoclastic and nimble-footed, unlike the grand old English newspapers that till a few years earlier mostly used to source their news from government handouts. The Typewriter Guerrillas also wrote whiplash prose that was shorn of the mindless phrases the bureaucracy preferred. Of course, the country had a vibrant Indian language media then too, but the English newspapers and publications commanded a profile disproportionate to their reach and influence.
If the new journalism in English in India was driven by the Typewriter Guerrillas, one of their staging posts was India Today, the magazine published by Purie and now the masthead of a multimedia organisation. A few years after the India Today magazine was launched, Arun Shourie would take journalism by storm and transform The Indian Express newspaper into a powerhouse of investigative journalism. As India Today’s editor-in-chief, Purie had a framed placard in his office that reproduced a version of the quote that inspires many a journalism student: “Somewhere someone wants to hide something; that’s news, everything else is advertising.”
Some of the Typewriter Guerrillas, such as Shourie, would eventually enter power politics, prompting some critics to ask whether their journalism at any stage was influenced by future career pursuits. Shourie, whose position on reservations stirred controversy, came to be associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party and became a minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. Controversies would eventually fell or sideline others like M.J. Akbar, the founder-editor of this newspaper, who has had a stint in the BJP-headed ministry, and Vir Sanghvi, who was credited by Nandy with the “eloquent description” of that phase of journalism as the “age of the typewriter guerrillas”.
Decades later, it is into this vacuum that a new crop of journalists, such as Rajendran and her team at The News Minute, and those at Newslaundry, The Reporters’ Collective, The Mooknayak, Eedina, Article 19, The Wire, Scroll and several other portals have stepped in. Not to mention Poonam Agarwal who persevered with her questions on the electoral bonds and played a stellar role in the events that culminated in the Supreme Court order that ripped the veil.
The questions that the payoffs raised prompted three organisations — Newslaundry, Scroll and The News Minute — and several independent journalists to launch ‘Project Electoral Bond’. The team includes Aban Usmani, Anand Mangnale, Anisha Sheth, Anjana Meenakshi, Ayush Tiwari, Azeefa Fathima, Basant Kumar, Dhanya Rajendran, Jayashree Arunachalam, Joyal George, M. Rajshekhar, Maria Teresa Raju, Nandini Chandrashekar, Neel Madhav, Nikita Saxena, Parth MN, Pooja Prasanna, Prajwal Bhat, Prateek Goyal, Pratyush Deep, Ragamalika Karthikeyan, Raman Kirpal, Ravi Nair, Sachi Hegde, Shabbir Ahmed, Shivnarayan Rajpurohit, Siddhartha Mishra, Supriya Sharma, Sudipto Mondal, Tabassum Barnagarwala and Vaishnavi Rathore.
This is an extraordinary initiative that brings under stress the tokenism of large sections of the mainstream media and their lame excuses, such as the lack of resources after the Covid-induced crisis. Project Electoral Bond has shown how resources and expertise can be pooled and what can be done with information that need not be complete.
The electoral bond story is still unfolding and it is a work in progress. But Project Electoral Bond has fulfilled the principal task of journalism: asking uncomfortable questions.
When the dogs do not bark, you know something is amiss. The watchdog called ‘mainstream’ media mostly snarled and growled but did not bark as loud as it could have when the electoral bond scandal exploded on the nation.
Here’s a sample of what one national newspaper did in 2011 on August 17, a day after Anna Hazare started his anti-corruption hunger strike when UPA-II was in power: “coverage on 14 pages, 34 news stories, 2 opinion pieces, 41 photographs, 1 cartoon,” according to a report by Pritam Sengupta in The Indian Journalism Review.
Barring some notable exceptions, most newspapers shied away from carrying out anything comparable to that carpet-bombing coverage when the first round of details on the electoral bonds trickled out. That is the glaring hole that has been plugged by the Keyboard Guerrillas of here and now.
It is by no means a generation thing. Giving the vote of thanks at the India Today conclave, Kalli Purie, vice-chairperson and executive editor-in-chief of the media group, said: “The media cannot play the role of the Opposition; expecting it to do that leads to unfair charges of Godi or Modi media. If the Opposition is in disarray, the media cannot be blamed for it. We cannot present another side equally strongly if it doesn’t exist. We are observers in this boxing match, we are not players. If one side is weak or doesn’t show up, we cannot jump into the ring. This is not fear. This is a matter of rules, roles and competence. We are the medium, we are not the message.”
The declaration, which might have been labelled astonishing a decade ago, must have been music to the ears of the Modi government.
That is why we need the Keyboard Guerrillas badly.
R. Rajagopal is editor-at-large, The Telegraph
