Political Reporting

(Introduction to a Panel Discussion held in memory of H. Y. Sharada Prasad at the Foreign Correspondents Club, New Delhi, 5 September 2019)

Dear Friends:

I thank you all for coming today for this panel discussion, marking 11 years since H Y Sharada Prasad passed away. I am grateful to the Foreign Correspondents Club for hosting this event — and especially to VK Cherian and Venkat Narayan, who took this initiative, and the other panelists: John Dayal, Ajoy Bose, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, P. Narendra-ji...

Before I proceed, I would like to remember a brave rationalist crusader and journalist, and someone known to our family, who was assassinated by thugs exactly two years ago — Gauri Lankesh. These are the perils of political reporting today.

I am a computer scientist, a professor, not a journalist. But my profession also has to contend with a challenge similar to what journalism has to — rubbish information, fake news, sometimes malicious and venomous, but mostly garbage.

Let me explain: if anyone of you are to look up “H Y Sharada Prasad” on Wikipedia today (increasingly what a young reporter might do) you will find an article which has some correct information in it, but a large amount of incorrect or irrelevant stuff. A photograph has been redacted, allegedly for copyright reasons (those reasons are bogus, incidentally). The first paragraph, with the dates of his birth and death, is reasonably correct. And then comes a complete stunner from left field: “As a Civil servant Sharada Prasad conducted a very famous Income Tax raid which was shown in the movie Raid (2018).” The next part of the article is only slightly less bizarre: it dwells at length on his name and his caste — the latter being completely unimportant to him. It is not accurate about his father’s position (he was a musician, composer and Sanskrit scholar) and neglects his mother’s achievements. The next paragraph is even more bizarre — it reads “At a very young age, Sharada Prasad was married to Kamalamma, a lady of his own Mulukanadu Brahmin community, and from a family of similar background, in a match arranged by their parents in the usual Indian manner.” Complete balderdash: my parents married late in their lives, and theirs was anything but an arranged marriage; Kamalamma was an Iyengar from a very different background. The article even gets wrong the year of Sharada Prasad being awarded the Padma Bhushan. And what you see today, you may not find tomorrow.

Now if this is “information” being put up by some well-meaning soul who actually seems to admire the subject of the article, imagine what we will get from politically motivated or malicious sources. One simply cannot trust what is available on the world wide web tap, when major details in the life stories of the topmost public figures are fabricated. And I shudder to think of information gleaned from WhatsApp university or anti-social media such as Twitter or the deeply compromised Quora.

So who was Sharada Prasad? There is a short biography that has been circulated — which is largely accurate, though if he were around, he would have run his editorial pencil over some parts of it. I will instead attempt to provide a very personal account of Sharada Prasad’s life — through my eyes and ears — tying it in with some of the major political events where he was present. You will not find this on Wikipedia or by Googling for it.

***

Sharada Prasad was a Gandhian first and then a Nehruvian. (Not only in temporal order, but also ideologically. This is perhaps important to understand him and the life he lived.) He was inspired by his maternal grandfather, a member of the Servants of India Society and a protege of Gokhale. As a young man, he met Gandhi-ji, who asked him what he wanted to become. In response to his answer, “A journalist”, the Mahatma remarked, "Oh, out to change the world, eh?"

In 1942-43, Sharada Prasad, secretary of the Mysore Maharaja’s College students union, was jailed during the Quit India movement. The diary he maintained shows his ability to comment concisely on the events and personalities of those times.

Around this time, he translated RK Narayan’s “Swami and Friends” into Kannada “Swami mattu avana snehitaru”. You can download a copy of this 1945 book from the BJP online library. (Yes, BJP’s library. I wonder why they have it there. Perhaps they think it’s about a different Swamy.)

After joining the Indian Express (Madras) in 1945, Sharada Prasad moved the following year to its Bombay sister (then called The National Standard). He was on duty as the chief sub-editor when on January 30, 1948 the news of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination came in. In all the frenetic activity, a frail old man came in and handed a sheet of paper to my father, saying it was his tribute. Sharada Prasad brusquely told him that everyone was issuing their own tribute to Bapuji. To which the man said very gently: “I am his son.”

Sharada Prasad was the first Indian to be a Nieman Fellow at Harvard (class of 1956). His year there during the Cold War, gave him a unique perspective on American foreign and domestic policy. Once, at a talk by Thomas E Dewey, he was sitting in the front row. Seeing an Indian, Dewey launched into a criticism of Nehru and India’s non-aligned foreign policy. (Dewey, as some of us might recall, was the subject of one of political journalism’s most egregious errors).

In most ways, I would say that his journalistic values were more influenced by American practices and conventions than British. Some of his Harvard classmates went on to very distinguished careers, such as Richard Harwood, Ombudsman of the Washington Post.

During Sharada Prasad’s stint as editor, Yojana, the journal of the Planning Commission, often carried articles on developmental issues that were critical of the official policy of the government, giving it credibility as a serious journal. Other governmental editors would ask him how he could get away with it. “By not asking for clearance. The trouble with advice is that if you ask for it, it will be given. The trouble with permission is that if you ask for it, it will be denied”, he would say.

I was too young to recall how he dealt with the tumultuous year of 1969, with bank nationalisation and the Congress split, but I have a slightly better recollection of 1971, when he worked tirelessly briefing the press on every development from the genocide in East Pakistan, the rallying of world opinion to India’s viewpoint, and the final liberation of Bangladesh in December. Various articles by him provide succinct accounts of those events and what transpired at the highest levels. In 1972, he was present at the signing of the Simla Accord and the last-minute agreements that made it possible, when even seasoned diplomats such as TN Kaul had given up and left.

The journalist Inder Malhotra, who wrote two biographies of Indira Gandhi, recalled some years ago with some nostalgia the nature of the press briefings by Sharada Prasad — and the professional integrity and personal decency he brought to his job, even when in adversarial roles: “He would cogently state the views of his boss, answer the questions with good humour, and not put any spin on events and policies.”

Not that the Press always took his word as gospel — I recall how he spent the best part of his 17th wedding anniversary trying to explain the workings of India’s “peaceful nuclear test”… only to have the papers write about “India’s Bomb”.

I was not around in Delhi in that particular day in June 1975, so I did not see firsthand the turmoil he went through in experiencing what he described as the “chill that hung in the room at 1, Akbar Road when the cabinet gave its approval to the proclamation”. The Emergency was a difficult period for him, trying to remain true to his Gandhian ethics while working in an autocratic governmental framework. One can see this in two of the most important books on the Emergency: PN Dhar’s “Indira Gandhi, the Emergency and Indian Democracy”, and BN Tandon’s “PMO Diaries”. (My brother Ravi has written about some of the covert negotiations between JP, represented by our maternal uncle KS Radhakrishna, and Indira Gandhi taking place in our house).

Sharada Prasad’s short tenure with Morarjibhai Desai was far less demanding — his new boss believed he could handle everything by himself, and always answered each question with a counter-question. He was however a straightforward and fair person. Sharada Prasad found his metier as a teacher (today is Teacher’s Day) and institution builder in the period 1978-80, when he was Director of IIMC. This was also when he was able to find time to write a few books. It was then that I got to spend much more time with him at home, and while he and TS Satyan toured Karnataka for a coffee-table volume.

The 1980-84 years were difficult ones because India had changed, and lost its innocence to terrorism. He was back in the PMO, but without the close set of brilliant colleagues with whom he had formed such a close personal and professional bond in the 1966-’77 period. There were still some old-time associates — Dr KP Mathur and above all G Parthasarathi, AK Damodaran, KR Narayanan and journalists such as VK Madhavan Kutty.

That world was to change forever on 31st October 1984. Sharada Prasad was waiting with Peter Ustinov in the garden of 1 Akbar Road, when they heard the rat-a-tat-tat of an automatic weapon emptying its charge. From Blue Star to the Delhi carnage, these were horrendous days for someone who was quintessentially Gandhian in thought and had seen some of the violence of India’s painful birth.

I won’t dwell further on Sharada Prasad’s journey in government, but will close with a few observations on how he saw the media change in his twilight years. He once very comically illustrated what he thought was wrong with TV News — “The anchor says something, then the camera goes to a reporter in the field, who says “Absolutely”, and then repeats what the anchor has just said. Then back in the studio, the anchor summarises what reporter has parroted, and turns to the channel’s own “political editor”, who then expounds on just that very same viewpoint. At no stage do they engage with anyone or anything other than their own opinions.”

I do not know how he would have reacted to the newly independent India of his young working life morphing itself into today’s shallow and celebrittle Times of India, or our brave young Republic to a raucous Republic TV. (Maybe it should be pronounced Republiktva).

Till the late 70s, Sharada Prasad was still of the opinion that his profession continued to respect people of integrity such as CN Chittaranjan (CNC of Mainstream) and, in government service, Mahendrabhai Desai. He had regard for the basic decency of people who were seen to be on the other side of a political fence, such as Kuldip Nayar. In his twilight years, however, he grew quite despondent about the crass commercialism to which journalists had descended. The ad revenues and business interests were now openly acknowledged as the drivers of the profession. The newspaper barons whom he had battled in the 50s as a working journalist had ultimately won, and the Chomsky-Herman Propaganda Model was in full swing.

***

During the tenure of HY Sharada Prasad as Information Advisor to prime ministers Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai, and Rajiv Gandhi, from 1966 to 1989, there was no social media and no internet. There was only one television channel — the government owned Doordarshan, and one radio network — the government owned All India Radio. However, there were thousands of newspapers and journals, in all Indian languages and English, as well as numerous foreign correspondents.

The panel will discuss how coverage of Indian politics has changed from the days of HY Sharada Prasad, the relationships between politicians and the media, the role of big business in media over the decades, how attempts are made to influence coverage or censor reportage, and the rise of fake news and disinformation. Thank you once again.