[Reader-list] The Ghost of the Middle Ground 1

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear Readers,

Happy New Year. I presume that many of us would be following the ongoing 
media circus with regard to the death sentence on Mohammad Afzal Guru. 
Here is a text that I have been working on for some time. It is long, so 
I have broken it up into a series of postings, rather than inflicting 
you with one mammoth post.

I would be happy to have comments and criticisms on this text, and would 
be grateful if anyone could point out any errors and/or discrepancies.

Looking forward to a better year in 2007,

Warm Regards

Shuddha

-------------------------------------

The Ghost of the Middle Ground
Uncertainty, Ambiguity and the Media Response to Efforts to Secure a 
Commutation of the Death Penalty for Mohammad Afzal Guru and An Enquiry 
into the Events of December 13

Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Januray 1, 2007

'Now is the Winter of Our Discontent made Summer by the Pleasing Light 
of Television'

At the beginning of each new year, it is customary to take stock of what 
has happened in the last 365 days, and reflect on options for the 
future. I don't want to speak for the entire year (let's leave the year 
end newspaper and magazine supplements and the TV round-ups to do that). 
But I do want to look at this bleak now, the ongoing "winter of our 
discontent", especially as it has played out on that hallowed and late, 
lamented entity called the 'middle ground'.

This 'middle ground' is a territory currently under the occupation of 
large bastions of the mainstream media in India. It was on the parched 
soil of the 'middle ground'  that the beast called public opinion was so 
eagerly sought to be beaten into shape (or pulp, depending on your point 
of view) in a daily gladiatorial during the course of the last few 
months. While this has always been the case, it did come into especially 
sharp focus ever since the question of the execution of Mohammad Afzal 
Guru came back on to what is sometimes called the 'national agenda' in 
late September - early October 2006. What began during our brief autumn 
rapidly gathered momentum as winter set in.

The thick fog that descends on Delhi with the onset of deep winter is a 
time where plots are laid 'in deadly hate', and 'dangerous inductions, 
drunken prophecies, libels and dreams' are aired by means of strategems 
that have every reason to be called 'subtle, false, and treacherous'. 
Had William Shakespeare been writing a draft of Richard the Third in 
Delhi during an early twenty first century winter, he might have set the 
bleak iambs of the opening soliloquy in a television studio, and made 
the actor speaking them wear the pressed suits of a certain variety of 
senior journalist or news anchor, or the uniform or distinguished 
plain-clothes attire usually to be found adorning the person of an 
operative of the special cell of the Delhi police, or the Intelligence 
Bureau. Perhaps there might even be some actors who could essay both 
roles (a certain kind ofjournalist and intelligence operative) with 
practised ease, because there is so little left nowadays, to distinguish 
between the two functions. Call it what you will, embodied intelligence, 
or embedded journalism.

 From the snuff-porn footage of the last minutes of a hated dictator's 
life, even as a noose is placed on his head, to unexamined admissions of 
torture on prime time, to lengthy extracts from a confession made under 
duress in police custody - our television sets and newspapers have 
brought home to us in the last few weeks - almost daily offerings from a 
bitter harvest made up of desparate attempts to manage and manipulate 
our perception of the times we live in. It makes me wonder whether it is 
the opaque nature of winter fog in Delhi that makes mirages, 
smoke-screens and other optical distortions so natural a part of our 
current media landscape? The more you watch it, the more the news from 
Delhi seems to resemble the city's weather report. Everything seems a 
little foggy. You can't quite make out what you see. And there are lots 
of fatal accidents.

There is undoubtedly a customary chill in the portents of December in 
Delhi. In December 2000, the absurd theatre of the now almost forgotten 
attack on the Red Fort was built on the foundations of a bizarre script. 
The plot featured a corpse that had undergone a post-mortem identity 
crisis (the dead Kashmiri 'terrorist' called 'Abu Shamal' turned out to 
be a migrant youth from Western Uttar Pradesh). A harvest of mobile 
phone numbers found miraculously at the scene of the crime written on a 
slip of paper instantly delivered suspects. An unexplained connection in 
the form of a link between the prime suspect, 'Ashfaq', a Pakistani 
illegal immigrant, (currently awaiting, like Mohammad Afzal Guru, the 
execution of a death sentence in Tihar Prison) and a man called Nain 
Singh, who happens to work  as a field officer with the Research and 
Analysis Wing of the Cabinet Secretariat (and in whose house 'Ashfaq' 
stayed for months)lingered on like an obstinate ghost. In addition there 
were other now familiar props like identity cards and computers.

[For a thorough, and excellently researched report on the 'Red Fort 
Case', and the many resonances between it and the 'Parliament Attack 
Case' see 'An Unfair Verdict: A Critique of the Red Fort Attack 
Judgement' published by the Peoples Union of Democratic Rights (PUDR) on 
December 22, 2006. A press release summarizing the main points of this 
report is available at www.pudr.org]

On 13 December 2001, in the now celebrated 'Parliament Attack' case, 
(and in the course of what followed in the last five years) we once 
again had an attack on a landmark in Delhi laden with symbolic 
significance, dead men with mixed up identities, identity cards, mobile 
phone numbers and anomalous call records, discrepancies between 
confessions made in police custody and statements made under section 313 
of the Criminal Procedure Code (like in the Red Fort case), the strange 
appearance and apparent involvement of people like Davinder Singh of the 
STF in Jammu & Kashmir, who are part of the security and intelligence 
agencies (once again, like Nain SIngh, the RAW operative in the Red Fort 
case) and a man (Mohammad Afzal) waiting to know in prison if he will hang.

Like a tarted up Hindi movie sequel broadcast to boost TRP ratings, 
December 2001 could almost be a re-make of the December 2000, that 
played once again on our TV sets in December 2006. I am writing this 
lengthy text, because I feel the need to find a handle with which I can 
get a grip on the way in which images and fragments of processed reality 
from large sections of media holds our imagination and our consciousness 
hostage.  I am trying and understand what makes the fog of news that 
emanates from Delhi in December smell so acrid, taste so bitter, each time.

Complexity and its Discontents

Most readers of this text would be familiar with the fact that efforts 
to stall and commute Mohammad Afzal Guru's impending execution (which 
have gathered a great deal of momentum over the past three months) have 
met with a variety of different responses. On the one hand more than two 
thousand people have signed a total of at least three online petitions 
in favour of the commutation of the death sentence. Dharnas, 
demonstrations and public meetings have been held in Delhi, in Kashmir 
and elsewhere in support of Afzal Guru. A curative petition arguing that 
Afzal did not have access to adequate legal representation at the 
crucial trial court stage has been filed in the Supreme Court on 
December 13 this year. Numerous texts and articles have been written in 
defence of the efforts to secure a commutation of the death sentence. 
They have been published in print in newspapers, magazines and journals 
and circulated online, on lists, blogs and webpages.

Even a book like '13 December- A Reader: The Strange Case of the Attack 
on the Indian Parliament' (recently published by Penguin India) needs to 
be seen as part, and only a part of the dispersed and disparate efforts 
by very different kinds of people (from different walks of life, and 
with different viewpoints and ideologies) to ensure that a gross 
violation of justice not be allowed to happen in the name of what the 
Supreme Court in its judgement on the case has called the 'collective 
conscience of society'.

If anything, the kind of questioning voices that might have been muted 
earlier  but are now beginning to make themselves heard clearly, should 
make us sit up and take notice of what is evident to any one who is 
observant. Clearly, the "collective conscience of society" at least with 
regard to Mohammad Afzal Guru's fate is a fractured entity. And even if 
those of us who speak in his favour are a minority today (although our 
numbers are steadily growing) it is presumptuous on anyone's part, be 
they commentators in the media, politicians or even a bench of the 
Supreme Court's, to assume that there is a unanimous consensus in our 
society on the question of whether or not, Mohammad Afzal Guru, or 
indeed anyone at all, should be hanged to death.

On the other hand, we have seen a virulent flood of sms messages 
broadcast live on television that has occasionally voiced demands which 
go to the extent of saying that  not only Afzal but all those speaking 
in his favour be also summarily executed in public. We have had the 
Bharatiya Janata Party organizing 'Hang Afzal' rallies in Delhi and 
elsewhere. We have had former intelligence agents, politicians and 
journalists of several descriptions twisting and turning themselves 
around to make vitriolic statements and non-statements about the issue, 
the spawning of several anti-Afzal blogs and webpages, the All India 
Anti Terrorist Front orchestrating the return of the medals awarded to 
the families of the security personnel who died on 13 December 2001, and 
the carefully calibrated continuation, through a series of planted 
stories, of the media trial of Mohammad Afzal Guru on television news 
channels.

In what follows, I will try and analyse and comment on a variety of 
different responses to the efforts to have Afzal Guru's sentence 
commuted. This is not an exhaustive or comprehensive attempt to index 
and analyse all that has been written and spoken, but I hope to give a 
reasonably thorough picture of the directions that the responses have 
taken. If nothing else, they point to a rich and variegated picture of 
how the media, and the means of communication have become a space where 
a nervous and cornered apparatus of power is doing all it can to create 
a smokescreen.

On Watching Television, Carefully

Unfortunately, the more it tries to work the smoke machine, the more it 
makes itself visible to our eyes. I am by no means the only person this 
is apparent to. A lot of people like me are constructing detailed 
personal archives of the spin doctoring that is going on in print and on 
screen.  We are reading newspapers with a tooth comb, browsing websites, 
recording television programmes, and we are beginning to recognize 
patterns, traces, tell tale signs. Each word, each image, each soundbyte 
is being carefully weighed and scrutinized, and often found wanting. In 
fact the intensity of high voltage media attention has not been able to 
generate a consensus, despite great efforts. This should surprise those 
media mandarins who believe that their 'whatever it takes' methods (to 
quote the tiresome CNN-IBN slogan) will automatically rally everyone 
around them. What they are getting instead is sustained, systematic 
attention from a number of patient, diligent and critical viewers. 
Sometimes that little spike in a TRP rating, or a readership survey is 
the worst news that a media mandarin can have. They might have been 
better off if less people took them as seriously, read and watched them 
as carefully as is being done now. Nothing that is published or 
broadcast today will go unnoticed. Besides which, there is the 
inconvenient fact that public memory is getting perversely long these 
days. Nothing that was published or broadcast a month or so ago, or five 
years ago will go forgotten. The media are being watched. Very carefully.

'Extremism' and 'Moderation'

But the issues at stake in all of this are much larger and more serious 
than who scores how many points against which newspaper and media 
channel. Criticism and counter criticism are good things. Those of us 
who have been chipping away at the edifice of the received wisdom on 
December 13 welcome the scrutiny and the criticism that we have received 
from large sections of the mainstream press. The fact that the views of 
those who question the verdict of death penalty for Mohammad Afzal, or 
call for an enquiry into December 13, or who speak against Capital 
Punishment as such, are increasingly difficult to ignore is definitely a 
good thing. But a careful examination of the response to these views 
suggests that the respondents are not interested in taking on the 
substance of what is being said in the book ('December 13: A Reader' 
)and other allied materials but that instead they insist, (without 
evidence) that those who call for an enquiry into the events of December 
13 only have the axe of an outrageously 'extremist' agenda to grind. 
This has been equated, variously with the 'evacuation' and even the 
'assassination' of the 'middle ground' of reasonable opinion and behaviour.

This charge needs to be addressed seriously, and in what follows, I will 
attempt to examine the rhetoric that insists that those who have called 
for a re-examination of December 13 have somehow an 'extremist' agenda. 
But before I do that, it is wise to remember that one of the most 
effective strategies of dissimulation is to paint one's adversaries as 
'extreme'. This automatically suggests that those calling others 
'extremists' are the very soul and substance of moderation. Thus, those 
who have expressed discomfiture at the irrevocable finality of the death 
penalty are  labelled 'extremists', while those howling for blood can 
claim for themselves the high moral ground of 'moderation'. Those asking 
for answers to a set of unresolved questions are accused of 'frightening 
intolerance' (Barkha Dutt, 'Death of the Middle Ground' Hindustan 
Times), and of being 'closed to debate', (CNN IBN while those who insist 
that the debate on the official version of December 13 stands closed, 
arrogate to themselves the soul of complexity and sophisticated ambiguity.

Never mind the fact that the goal-posts of Barkha Dutt's middle ground 
have shifted twice with breathtaking speed as autumn turned to winter. 
The first time was when she moved from a spirited defence of capital 
punishment against those called terrorists three days before Mohammad 
Afzal was originally supposed to hang (in 'Battle For Life', October 17, 
2006) to a plea that Afzal's life be spared, (in 'Warning, Handle With 
Care' on November 10, 2006) not because of any change in her perception 
of his crime, (for which she still demanded the 'harshest punishment 
possible'), but because commutation could ensure that Kashmir would not 
go up in flames. The second time the middle ground moved for her was 
when she leapfrogged from a homily on the virtue of moderation, respect 
for ambiguity and the necessity for the media to situate itself within 
shades of grey (in 'Death of the Middle Ground', December 17, 2006 ) to 
a triumphant celebration of bias and subjectivity (in 'Subject to the 
Truth', December 23, 2006 ). In fact the middle ground moved so often 
and so quickly in these thirty six odd days (from October 17 to December 
23) that Barkha Dutt almost became a televised blur.

[See, the following, in their order of publication, as given below, to 
follow the trajectory of this whirlwind

1. 'Battle for Life', October 17, 2006
     http://www.ndtv.com/columns/showcolumns.asp?id=1061
2. 'Warning, Handle with Care' Third Eye, Hindustan Times, November 10, 2006
3. 'Death of the Middle Ground', Third Eye, Hindustan Times, December 
17, 2006
4. 'Subject to the Truth', Hindustan Times, December 23, 2006
      http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1877176,00300006.htm ]

Lonely at NDTV?

A lesser mortal like me would be tempted to see a streak of cynical 
opportunism if not an absurd lack of consistency in the meandering logic 
of Barkha Dutt and others like her. However, since I have no access to 
the rarified atmosphere of ethical uncertainty that currently prevails 
in broadcast television, I would be the first person to plead guilty to 
the charge of having little or no understanding of the immense 
complexities that beset those who occupy the higher altitudes of broken 
news. Would it be asking for too much though, if we were to demand that 
when media luminaries like Ms. Dutt, who command a great deal of 
influence with the great Indian middle class, go so wrong in their own 
estimation as to subsequently do a one hundred and eighty degree 
volte-face from some aspects (from 'kill the terrorist' to 'no, don't 
kill the terrorist', 'long live shades of grey' to 'shades of grey be 
damned, three cheers for subjectivity') of their publicly stated 
position, they also take us, their readers and viewers into confidence, 
and apologize for the consequences of their previous pronouncements. 
Just an occasional 'sorry ji, galti ho gayi, I should not have asked for 
people to be hanged so easily', said or written in public, might suffice 
as evidence of the sincerity of her rapid transformations. We, the 
people, will be content with that. Without that apology however, the 
corner of the 'middle ground' that Barkha Dutt says she represents seems 
way too ethically deficient to sustain anyone other than the likes of 
her. Until this is done, we can only commiserate, at a distance, with 
what must be the unbearable loneliness of   having to take 
'unequivocally unpopular' positions while having to work at NDTV.

(contd. in next posting)