[Reader-list] Kesavan in the Telegraph

[S. Jabbar]

 WE, THE PEOPLE
- The Mumbai tragedy and the English language news media
Mukul Kesavan

³Go to the Four Seasons and look down from the top floor at the slums around
you. Do you know what flags you will see? Not the Congress¹s, not the BJP¹s,
not the Shiv Sena¹s. Pakistan! Pakistani flags fly high!... You know what I
think? We should carpet-bomb Pakistan. That¹s the only way we can give a
clear message.²

Simi Garewal later apologized for this little outburst on the television
show, We, the People. She said she had mistaken Muslim flags for Pakistani
ones. She had a harder time explaining away her Œcarpet bombing¹
prescription. She claimed that she had meant to suggest a covert attack like
the below-the-radar missions Americans so often undertake in Pakistan¹s
borderlands. Carpet-bombing is hard to do discreetly, but we shouldn¹t make
too much of this because the point isn¹t Simi Garewal and her gaffe: it¹s
the way the English language news media covered the Mumbai tragedy.

The idiom of the coverage of the terror attack on Mumbai was in part shaped
by the need to say something, anything, in the face of horror and evil. The
need to voice not just their own feelings but the need to be a proxy for the
People, to anticipate and echo a public revulsion, seemed to overwhelm
reporters and studio anchors.

The wild-eyed animation with which they spoke seemed prompted by the belief
that calm, even lucidity, was an inappropriate response to tragedy. Barkha
Dutt¹s agitation as she reported from sites attacked by the terrorists was
so extreme that on occasion she seemed to hyper-ventilate on camera. Further
away from the tragedy, in a studio, Arnab Goswami ratcheted up the hectoring
self-righteousness that has come to define his manner, as he and Times TV
seek to position the channel as India¹s answer to Fox News.

Rajdeep Sardesai managed to be composed, compassionate and knowledgeable at
Hemant Karkare¹s funeral, but CNN IBN made up for that later by framing
their reports on the terror strikes in gory graphics that could have been
borrowed from the credits of a Ramsay Brothers horror movie. With the
reporters, the excitement was understandable: it¹s hard to be calm with
bombs going off, bullets flying about and a landmark building burning in
front of you. But there were aspects of the coverage that didn¹t deserve the
benefit of the doubt.

During the crisis, the foregrounding of the Taj was inevitable. It was the
site of the longest battle and the hideous drama of its near-destruction was
bound to be framed by any sensible cameraman. But it¹s still worth making
the point Shyam Benegal made, that the dozens of people killed in VT (or
CST) station and their grieving relatives and friends got very little screen
time. When VT figured in the coverage, it was there for CCTV grabs of the
T-shirted terrorist.

The Taj, we were told over and over again, is an Œiconic¹ building. I think
we can say without controversy that Victoria Terminus is much the greater
landmark both architecturally and in terms of the number of people who pass
through it. It may not be Œhome¹ to them, in the way that the Taj clearly
was for the many fluent habitués of South Mumbai who filed past the cameras
of the English news channels, but more Mumbaikars have taken trains to and
from VT than have sampled the hospitality of the Taj. And yet we didn¹t have
people on television reminiscing about the station and what it meant to
them, that storied building that has been the beginning and the end of a
billion journeys. Even the details of the killing, the alertness of the
public address system operator who had platforms cleared and thus minimized
the carnage, trickled out later, as the platform tragedy that had happened
was eclipsed by the hotel tragedy that was still Œbreaking news¹.

I can¹t remember the last time that social class so clearly defined the
coverage of a public event, or one in which people spoke so
unselfconsciously from their class positions. The English news channels
became mega-churches in which hotel-going Indians found catharsis and
communion. Person after person claimed the Taj as home. Memories of
courtship, marriage, celebration, friendship, the quick coffee, the
saved-up-for snack, the sneaked lavatory visit, came together to frame the
burning Taj in a halo of affection.

The novelist, Aravind Adiga, said in an interview with the BBC: ³One of the
differences between India and other countries is that a lot of our civic
space is contained within the five-star hotels. They have a different
function here for us, they are places where marriages happen, where people
of all economic backgrounds go for a coffee. For the Taj Mahal to be
attacked is somewhat like the town hall being attacked in some other
place... .² I¹d wager that 99 per cent of VT¹s commuters haven¹t seen the
inside of the Sea Lounge. Whatever else they are, five-star establishments
in India are not democratic civic spaces. Few Mumbaikars think the Taj Mahal
Hotel is their city¹s hôtel de ville.

The Trident, being less Œiconic¹, didn¹t get quite the same attention as the
Taj, but it wasn¹t left out. Shekhar Gupta used his column on the edit-page
of the Indian Express to write a thousand-word homage to the Trident. This
included descriptions of his sleeping preferences, the number of nights he
had logged at the Trident and the considerateness of the hotel staff.

This takes us back to that third hotel, the one we began with, back to Simi
Garewal on the top floor of the Four Seasons, looking down at the slums
below her, aflutter with sinister flags. Forget the fact that she mistook
Islamic flags for Pakistani ones; anyone can make a mistake, and she¹s
apologized for hers. What¹s interesting here is the lack of embarrassment
with which she pictures herself and people-like-her staring down
disapprovingly from a great, air-conditioned height at hovels and squalor.

Usually, privileged English-speaking Indians have the tact to be politically
correct in their public statements; but in the middle of terror and tragedy,
the sense of social self-preservation that keeps them from crassness,
disappears. ³Go to the Four Seasons and look down from the top floor at the
slums around you.² That Œyou¹ is us: Telegraph-reading, hotel-going people,
who, in the heat of the moment and because of the death of people we know
(or know of), become the world.

English and American papers treated the terror attack as an assault on the
West. The terrorists had, after all, specifically looked for American and
British citizens to murder. Ironically, even as NDTV, CNN-IBN and Times Now
put hotel guests at the heart of the horror and bumped train commuters to
its periphery, older English-speaking peoples counted their dead and dimly
regretted all Indian casualties as collateral damage. In that residual
category, if nowhere else, the Indian dead remained one People.