Recent events in India have highlighted the possibilities of Chinese infiltration in the country’s media. This opens the need for a larger discussion.
Let us consider the United States, the bastion of free market capitalism. There are two industries where foreign investment is restricted and controlled: defence and the media. The media mogul Rupert Murdoch had to change his nationality and become a US citizen before he could gobble up American companies. In this regard, India has imitated the US. A quasi-apocryphal story that has been floating around says that many years ago, a foreign business paper was “certain” that India’s foreign direct investment (FDI) rules would be amended, enabling its entry into the country. That did not happen — partly because of the strong opposition from Indian print tycoons, we are told. Even an unabashed supporter of free capital movements like this writer must be gratified in retrospect that our government — I believe it was the Narasimha Rao establishment — stayed away from this “liberalisation”. Clearly, we should learn both from the mistakes and the good policies of the US government.
We have restrictions on newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and TV channels. But the ubiquitous, octopus-like internet has forced us to face fresh problems. Can a foreigner own an Indian website, content provider, or uploader? This area is virtually impossible to police. This is where we see a lot of gaming of the vulnerabilities in our restrictive laws. We have an additional issue with self-styled NGOs and think-tanks that are almost entirely funded by foreign parties intruding into and attempting to dominate the information flows in our country.
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The details matter
Foreign-controlled or directed information flows are not all bad. But the devil is in the details. Our imperial, imperious government in Indraprastha (sorry, Delhi) banned Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which was published abroad by leveraging the import restrictions under Customs Acts. It is not clear whether Rushdie was punished for being of Indian origin or because he was British. I have a sneaking suspicion that the ones in the great Delhi political establishment were prejudiced because Rushdie hailed from Warden Road (sorry Bhulabhai Desai Road) in my home city, Mumbai. Rushdie was punished because he angered former VVIPs in Delhi. Such details matter.
If there are countries that we consider our adversaries, two come to mind: Pakistan and China. The former has a karmic problem with us, which, I suspect, will remain in the days of our great-grandchildren. The case with the latter is curious: Beijing has unnecessarily jeopardised a burgeoning relationship with us, which was the result of Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic approach. They have virtually forced us into the arms of the West despite our lingering reservations and suspicions toward accepting the embrace of powerful grizzly bears. In recent times, we have acquired a new adversary — and I need to insist on an adjective before the name of this country — Sanctimonious Canada.
It’s not at all unreasonable to view any websites, content providers, NGOs and think-tanks with Pakistani, Chinese, or Canadian connections with suspicion. After all, let us look at it with the lens of symmetry. If an Indian-controlled entity were to base itself in Islamabad, Beijing, or Ottawa and started disseminating information about the persecution of Christians and Ahmadiyyas in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the incarceration of Uyghurs and Tibetans in the glorious People’s Republic of China, or of rampant Indophobia in the Sanctimonious Dominion of Canada, would that pass muster? Can the purveyors of this information get away by simply pleading that they were just speaking the truth? Unlikely.
In the first two countries, they would be locked up and the keys thrown away. The third is the most interesting one. The young Prime Minister of Sanctimonious Canada is likely to say that those complaining of Indophobia were secret Nazis and their bank accounts should be frozen.
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Scalpel over the axe
My two cents for the current dispensation in Delhi: Let us use the surgeon’s scalpel rather than the woodcutter’s axe. These insidious and aggravating foreign intrusions are best dealt with using our expert bureaucrats in the Income Tax Department. Even before the trials commenced and as soon as our tax czars published the allegations against hyper-respectable foreign broadcasters and NGOs, they clammed up. Gone were the whining, grievance-mongering platitudes about the attacks on the freedom of the media or on humanitarian NGOs. The credible allegations (and as yet, they are only “credible allegations”, taking a cue from Nawab Justin) showed them to be wannabe tax fiddlers. And although Indians don’t like to pay taxes, we do experience a sense of schadenfreude when others, especially foreigners face the dreaded notices, which now come increasingly by email in two languages, one of which I have some difficulty with.
Bilingual tax notices are scalpels; terrorism dossiers are axes. When the scalpel can so easily wound, why resort to the use of axes?
I am an old man who remembers the ’50s and ’60s. I recall two magazines: Span, published by the US Information Service (the Central Intelligence Agency) and Soviet Land, published by the Soviet Embassy (the KGB). These magazines typically paid their Indian contributors huge sums of money for writing unmitigated drivel. As the French say, the more things change…
Today, we are told that anti-India self-styled bogus intellectuals in Delhi and NRI journalists are handsomely rewarded. It appears that self-appointed Scandinavian (should I have said ‘Sanctimonious Scandinavian’?) judgmental organisations repeatedly poll the same small set of rum-drinking anti-India Leftists in order to produce bizarre reports bemoaning our fate as a country. One wonders why they don’t talk to those who live in Bhulabhai Desai Road or Indira Nagar!
Historical memory of the repeated attempts at the subversion of our country going back to the ’50s must continue to guide us. We must be wary not only of Pakistan, China, and Canada, but of all foreign sources of funding, patronage, and influence. But I must repeat that terrorism charges sound clumsy; income tax evasion charges are both elegant and sufficient.
Jaithirth Rao is a retired businessperson who lives in Mumbai. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)