If you don’t have core beliefs, you shouldn’t be a citizen, let alone a journalist: Vir Sanghvi

Journalist-author Vir Sanghvi discusses his memoirs 'A Rude Life', post-1991 India, and Modi in conversation with ThePrint's Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on Off The Cuff.

Journalist-author Vir Sanghvi at the virtual Off The Cuff Thursday | ThePrint

New Delhi: Those without any core values or beliefs should not be citizens of a country, let alone journalists, Vir Sanghvi has said.

Journalist and author Sanghvi made the statement in conversation with ThePrint’s Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on Off The Cuff (OTC) last Thursday. He was answering a viewer’s question on his criticism of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and why he didn’t write as a neutral.

“I don’t think there is anybody who is neutral when it comes to politics. You may be neutral when it comes to party politics… but it’s not fair to say, ‘Don’t have any core values, don’t have any core beliefs’,” Sanghvi said.

Sanghvi and Gupta discussed a wide range of topics during the hour-long OTC session, such as the former’s life experiences — documented in his memoirs A Rude Life, released in July — along with the evolution of India’s middle-class following the 1991 economic reforms; the popular appeal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi; issues plaguing the Congress; and the future of print journalism.

‘New middle class’ vs ‘old middle class’ in post-1991 India

According to Sanghvi, the 1991 reforms that ushered in economic liberalisation resulted in people being “pushed” into the middle class from backgrounds that didn’t necessarily qualify as such in the preceding years.

“[People in ‘new middle class’] don’t share the assumptions and the views or the values of the ‘old middle class’… in many ways, they resent what [the ‘old middle class’] represents, and that leads to a certain amount of social tension,” Sanghvi said, adding that these tensions play out on social media, in politics and in people’s households.

Sanghvi said this resentment of the “old middle class” is, to an extent, explained by the “elitist behaviour” that some members of the group engage in, such as command over the English language or the educational institutions they attend. 

“The old middle class, in many ways, sowed the seeds of its own destruction,” Sanghvi said, adding the caveat that this resentment has now gone too far in the age of social media. 

“[People in ‘new middle class’] start questioning everything that went in the past; they start questioning the values of what they view as ‘old middle class’ such as secularism,” he added. 

‘Print journalism in trouble, India no exception’

Sanghvi spoke at length about his fears for the future of traditional print journalism due to the popularity of digital media, stating that the older format is on a “downward spiral” at a global level, including in India. 

While Sanghvi remained optimistic about the survival of print journalism overseas, he said the format is in particular danger in India due to a widely-held belief among readers that they need not pay to read the news. 

This belief, Sanghvi said, was cultivated by the business model adopted by traditional broadsheets in India in the second half of the 20th century.

“Journalism all over the world is paid for by a mixture of subscription revenue and advertising revenue… what happened in India was that we started giving our newspapers away at low prices, sometimes even for free, looking for huge circulations,” Sanghvi said.

“We have to break out of this cycle where Indians believe that news is something given for free, because that itself has led so many people to believe ridiculous WhatsApp forwards they can access for free,” he warned. “If we want to be well-informed, we have to be prepared to pay for it.”

(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)