OBJECTIVITY FAVORS IDEOLOGIES NOT TRUTH

Following is the text of the paper Riyaz Masroor presented in the GK Foundation’s daylong seminar on The Role of Intelligentsia vis-à-vis Kashmir on September 9
Objectivity is conventionally understood as the art of writing balanced news. That plainly means balancing truth with untruth. Yet there is a tiny but vibrant minority of intellectuals who describe the objectivity as a ‘colonial discourse’ through which the ruling elites spread lies and some truths that favor their interests.
Let’s believe for a moment that the media is a democratic institution. That way it is located between the spheres of the state and the civil society. Generally the media adopts a demeanor that makes it appear on the side of civil society. This impression has been so much hammered into public opinion that the readers, viewers or listeners largely believe that the media supports the civil society and serves its interests.
The question whether the media serves the interests of the civil society or the state or both or neither is a tricky one. To reach to some reasonable conclusion let’s have a recap of the media scene here.
We have close to twenty offset English as well as Urdu newspapers hitting the stands daily and some of them weekly. There is a sound if not strong presence of international media through its correspondents here. We have New Delhi controlled electronic media such as Radio Kashmir and Door Darshan Kendra. Of late we see several cable services venturing into news coverage. There are half a dozen news agencies, which circulate news events through email and SMS.
Barring a few exceptions none of the newspapers have their correspondents stationed in peripheries. It might be partly because the independent news media is yet to grow as an industry and partly because the Police and armed forces still remain the primary source of news and information.
The media access to interiors remains confined within the Barahmullah-Srinagar-Khanabal axis while the incidents are happening hundreds of miles away in Gurez, Karnah, wadwan Doda, interiors of Poonch, Rajouri and Ladakh.
Thanks to belated advent of cellular services in Kashmir, the reporters who are willing to bring facts and deliver truth find it easier to have an objective account rather than buying the state version.
If objectivity means being honest while disseminating the facts, many if not all, Kashmiri journalists have done that even at the risk of their lives. The state has ways to coerce but most of our honest reporters had been struggling to find their way. There have all along been the exceptions yet there are people who have suffered lot of pain while being objective.
Generally conflict reporting is more than a challenge. But I feel unable to explain how difficult it is to report your own conflict in which your own commitments and prejudices are rooted.
My senior colleague in BBC Altaf Hussain says, “One Hundred percent objectivity is impossible but that doesn’t mean we shun it. A Journalist willing to be objective while reporting his own conflict must have three traits: correct perspective, skill and character. Not necessarily that he always gets the other side but he should be honest to the dissemination of facts.”
While calibrating pressures the media has tried to strike the middle ground. It might also have tried to keep its pro-civil society image intact and that is where objectivity comes handy.
In places such as Kashmir, state always lacks legitimacy. It wants to be seen as an entity besides the advocates of resistance. So while we try to play objective without a proper perspective we end up accommodating the anti-civil society discourse next to the civil society demands, making it a heady mix of ideologies rather than an account of truth.
State has its own ideology about Kashmir. According to this ideology it is fighting a war against “terrorism” and wants public as well as intellectuals support it in restoring normalcy. There are non state forces who also espouse an ideology. Their ideology is fighting against the “Indian occupation” and seeking public as well as intellectual support to restore the “freedom of the people.”
There are many exceptions yet the Kashmiri journalists have dared to steer clear of this ideological clash. It is we who told the real story to the world when the latest phase of the turmoil broke out.
Religion has been a biggest challenger for a Muslim Kashmiri reporter while placing himself on an objective point in these clashing ideologies. While the separatist forces expect him to be on their side because of his faith, the state forces want him to prove his credentials by promoting the state ideology.
Robert Fisk is one of the few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden - three times (all published by The Independent: December 6, 1993 July 10, 1996, and March 22, 1997).
During one of Fisk's interviews with Bin Laden, Fisk noted an attempt by Bin Laden to possibly recruit him. Bin Laden said, "Mr. Robert, one of our brothers had a dream. He dreamed ... that you were a spiritual person ... this means you are a true Muslim." Fisk replied, "Sheikh Osama, I am not a Muslim ... I am a journalist".

So, the objective journalist requires to side with truth rather than ideology. How far it is possible in the given situation remains debatable.
A little thinking over the local media scenario would explain why the death of a beast in Tral consumes prime time of Indian TV Channels and Khundroo incident doesn’t get even a scroll space? We can easily understand why a small religious festival grabs headlines and the death of 33 children in Wular tragedy gets confused. No surprises, therefore, why the crime of sexual exploitation becomes a media movement and vanishes within seven weeks.
I would not sweepingly term the objectivity a myth. But in the prevalent practices of controlling dissent it is a fragmented rather than a whole entity. When we believe that we cannot be absolutely objective in reporting conflict the challenge to paint the real picture is not as much on a reporter’s shoulder as it is upon the intellectuals.
It is they who have to decide their political and moral location. Here we often witness the opposite of it. We see reporters straying to the commentator’s domain and intellectuals overlooking the ground reality and hiding behind their own personal narratives and travelogues.
The last century’s Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci tells us how the intellectuals, social groups and other institutions end up serving the cause of the state. He defined the State as coercion combined with hegemony and according to Gramsci hegemony is political power that flows from intellectual and moral leadership, authority or consensus as distinguished from armed force.
According to Gramsci a ruling class forms and maintains its hegemony in civil society, i.e. by creating cultural and political consensus through unions, political parties, schools, media, the church, and other voluntary associations where hegemony is exercised by a ruling class over allied classes and social groups.
The Prime Minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh said during Ram Nath Goinka award function in 2006: "I also believe that the journalism of courage is not just about giving voice to those who are willing to shout , but it is about giving voice to the voiceless and to those who choose to be silent. Objectivity does not imply neutrality. It implies respect for truth and facts, and a willingness to take positions, howsoever contrarian or contentious.”
When the Prime Minister of India insists on taking sides for truth you need not to be Einstein to deduce the message. When the PM wants to take sides, it certainly implies that he seeks intellectual support in fighting terror and restoring normalcy. Similar pointed sermons have been coming from the non state camp as well.
Can we expect ‘objectivity’ in newspaper columns when the state or non state forces acknowledge the ‘contribution’ of our writers by way of conferring awards?
Noted writer, theorist and political commentator Eqbal Ahmad says that Creativity suffers when intellectuals and artists seek proximity to power. He reminds us of Medieval Muslim civil society, which was unequivocally classified.
Wrote Eqbal Ahamad: “Muslims in that era saw poets as belonging to two categories: The Sha'ir-ul-Khilafa, poet of power, lived in the capital - darul-khilafa, enjoyed the Caliph's favors or those of his courtiers and viziers, and basked self-importantly in the privileges of patronage. Artistically he tended to slide backwards becoming adept only in the passing skills of hijv and qasida.
The shai'r-ul-imamah, poet who led, lived in the provinces often in modest circumstances, close to the heartbeat of society, and spoke truth to power. They are the ones we know still.
The contrast was drawn again in the previous century by Gramsci.
He distinguished the state and civil society as distinct entities. He draws three fundamental conclusions:
i) When civil society (which includes professional, literary and artistic institutions and associations) conforms uncritically or is coerced by the state into silence, totalitarianism prevails.
ii) When civil society enjoys a lively network of institutions and associations, and these maintain critical links with state institutions, then democracy prevails.
iii) When state and society are structurally and culturally antagonistic to each other, then conditions of civil war and anarchy obtain, and the society evades either fate only when its intelligentsia forges and popularizes a program for reform or revolution.
In all three situations the choices artists and intellectuals make affect not only their own but their society's destiny.
Author is a Srinagar-based BBC journalist . He can be reached at rmasroor@gmail.com

Zardari’s unripe mangoes

PPP cochairman’s Kashmir talk is too loose to please India, writes Riyaz Masroor
Asif Ali Zardari is said to have wooed the charming Benazir, when he met her in London, with crates of mangoes from Fortnum & Mason, and marrons glacés. He knew the aristocratic Bhuttos would frown over his proposal because despite their vast estates in Sindh’s Nawabshah district Zardaris were seen as upstarts against the aristocratic Bhuttos.
Both married in 1987 and those crates of mangoes fetched $1.5 billion to Zardari as part of commission he would charge to contractors and business houses. He came to be known as Mr 10 percent and the sobriquet has indelibly stuck.
Both the famed diamond necklace in Switzerland and the Rockwood mansion outside London, according to a British newspaper, were linked to Zardari’s girlfriends. This and much more came his way by ‘investing’ few crates of mangoes; he knew he was betting on a long running horse.
Now that the ‘winning horse’ is dead and the death has propelled Zardari to the center stage, he is back with his ‘crate of mangoes’, this time offering them to India ; unabashedly in the blood-soaked package of Kashmir issue.
His reckless assertion that the Kashmir issue be shelved for posterity can draw weird comparisons, notwithstanding the clarification from his spokesman Farhatullah Babar.
It appears like a jolly child wanting a pretty bride to wait till he came of age and marry her. Or, it sounds like the prodigal husband of a princess, planning how he would spend the dowry, not knowing that the fief he thinks belonged to him was long forfeited. There are other quipping reactions saying that Zardari actually employed his idiotic streak to convey that his son Bilawal is the King-in-Waiting hence the idea of leaving the resolution of Kashmir issue upon the ‘energetic’ shoulders of the ‘new generation’.
Kashmiri politicians on either side of the political divide reacted to Zardari’s remark but with varied degree of caution and anger. While the National Conference patron Dr Farooq Abdullah hailed the ‘new concept’ the Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad promptly welcomed it. Separatists especially Syed Ali Geelani, Muhammad Yasin Malik, Shabir A Shah and others termed it an insult to the sacrifices of Kashmiris as well as many Pakistanis who according to Geelani are still fighting to liberate Kashmir from the Indian occupation.
Mufti Muhammad Syed, patron of the ruling ally Peoples Democratic Party, displayed his trademark shrewdness when he, without even obliquely referring to Zardari’s statement, emphasized the need to resolve Kahsmir. However his ‘tamed’ rebel in PDP and Azad’s deputy, Muzaffar Hussain Baig had no qualms in endorsing the statement.
Founder of the banned militant outfit Lashkar-e-Toibah (The pious army), Hafiz Muhammad Sayeed accused Zardari of pleasing India and US.
But Sayeed’s reading seems blurred because Zardari need not rake up Kashmir to please Americans who brokered his electoral win.
If Zardari aspires to become Pakistani answer to Sonia Gandhi and call shots from behind, he is miscalculating his ‘mangoes’. He may share some parallels with Sonia; both have inherited the political fortunes of their spouses and both see their son as the future PM. But, while Sonia despite being an outsider managed to earn a place for herself in her party and may be also among people due to her refusal to becoming the Prime Minister, Benazir’s admirers and adversaries equally detest Zardari for corruption and sleaze.
Interestingly the Pakistan Peoples Party despite its proximity with India and US did not peddle Kashmir card during the poll campaign. Commonsense dictates that if PPP earned a mandate against Musharraf and ‘in favor of democracy’ it sounds morally incorrect to juggle Kashmir rather than the ‘restoration of democracy’.
Whatever principles the PPP professed post Zulfikar’s execution, it cannot so easily rub off the impression it has earned by the radical and hawkish stand over Kashmir. People are yet to forget Zulfikar’s passionate calls for a “1000-year Jihad against India”; his daughter Benazir would quite often reiterate this when in power. The Kashmiri anguish, therefore, is all the more understandable. More particularly because Kashmiris had been intensely emotional about the senior Bhutto as they saw in him the savior after he commissioned Pakistan’s nuclear program and threw up a rhetorical coinage of “Islamic Bomb”.
It was because of this perception that Bhutto’s execution in late seventies triggered a violent wave in Kashmir against General Zia and his supporters. Curiously, when Zia died in a mysterious air crash in 1988, Kashmir shut down in protest.
Many doubt if Zardari enjoys the hundred percent support from Pakistani army whose ex generals have recently pledged to take the Kashmir movement to its logical end and “eliminate the hurdles” coming in its way.
WHEN Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was deposed as Pakistan's prime minister in 1977, his 24-year-old daughter, Benazir sounded optimistic about General Zia-ul-Haq and expected the coup leader to hold elections in a few months.
A British newspaper recalls Zulfikar’s response: “Don't be an idiot, Pinkie,” said her father, using the nickname inspired by her rosy complexion as an infant, “Armies do not take over power to relinquish it.”
Going by this paternal piece of advice, which Benazir must have shared with her husband, Zardari’s ‘offer’ to India seems more idiotic than Pinkie’s remark. And Indians are not so jumpy that they would celebrate Zardari’s offer because they know what it takes to realize the ideological goals after hitching to a coalition. We still remember how zealously the BJP, after getting lead in elections announced that it would rewrite the Indian constitution to integrate J&K and construct the Ram Temple at Babri Masjid. But the compulsions of a coalition saw their leaders praising Muhammad Ali Jinnah as the icon of secularism.
So Mr Zardari! If you aspire to become Mr 100 percent after Benazir’s death please hold back your crate of mangoes. You should remember the Indian season for the fruit begins from April. Sorry, the mangoes are unripe.


(The article appeared in Rising Kashmir on March 10,2008)