Tavleen Singh writes: These are all questions that our political leaders need to answer but why should they if we in the media do not ask them enough? (Express Archives)
Jan 5, 2025 07:14 IST First published on: Jan 5, 2025 at 07:14 IST
It could be an exalted sense of my place in the grand scheme of things. It could be that when I sit down to write the first column of a new year, I remember that journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history. Whatever the reason, I admit that as I sat down to write this first column of 2025, I felt nervous and a little overwhelmed. I do not like to read those tedious catalogues of events in the year just gone by, so I try not to write them. I thought of writing about the ominous spurt in Islamist terrorism that we saw last week in the United States and the week before in Germany, but much has already been said about this. So, I have decided to stick instead to examining if we in the Indian media are indeed writing that first draft of history in a way that will be useful to historians in the future.
No sooner did I start mulling over this subject than I saw clearly that we have been writing a draft that will be of little use to historians except those who have a special interest in political gossip, trivia and frivolous details. Political journalism has deteriorated to a point when most of us so-called political pundits never seem to get beyond writing about political bickering and political speeches. So much attention is paid to these two things that we seem never to get to the issues that really affect ordinary people like healthcare, education, pollution and the horrendous conditions in which most Indians are forced to live.
Since I have in the past few weeks been dealing with a medical emergency at home I shall start with healthcare. I have been in and out of the best hospitals in Mumbai recently and have been distressed to find that at the top of our healthcare pyramid there is such a shortage of doctors that they have little more than a few minutes to spend with patients. They whizz in and whizz off to the next patient not because of carelessness but because they really have only so much time. I happen to have some experience of hospitals in Switzerland and the contrast between doctors there and here shocked me. If this is the state of our finest private hospitals what must be happening in government hospitals? Why is there such a shortage of doctors? Have too many fled to countries that pay better? Are there too few medical colleges?
If we want our political leaders to answer these questions, we in the media should ask them more often. Just as we need to ask more often why students must take to the streets to protest examinations being cancelled at the last minute. Why at such an impressionable age should our young people need to deal with despair and corruption? Why is higher education such a mess that it is not possible to become a civil servant, a doctor or an engineer without needing to pay huge amounts of money to coaching institutes?
When it comes to the abysmal conditions in which most Indians live, I do not know where to begin. Our cities have become hellholes in which something as vital as being able to breathe clean air is a right that has been taken away by bad governance and corrupt politicians. Something as fundamental to urban living as affordable housing has seen almost no investment, forcing most people in our metropolises to live in conditions that would be considered too degraded for animals in other countries.
Filth and poverty have little to do with each other. There are much poorer countries than India that can afford to provide their citizens with a more hygienic, salubrious environment. Why is this? Why does our dear Bharat Mata look so bad? Why does India offer so little hope that even millionaires seem to be leaving in droves? Why do Indians who have enough money to pay human traffickers go through unspeakable ordeals to get to the United States?
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These are all questions that our political leaders need to answer but why should they if we in the media do not ask them enough? When we discover that 4,300 Indian millionaires left India last year and that 5,100 left the year before, it makes a few paragraphs in the newspapers. When we discover that a family from Gujarat froze to death on the border of the United States, it makes a bit more than a few paragraphs. When Delhi turns into a gas chamber every winter, a few learned editorials get written. But when belligerent spokesmen of political parties shriek abuse at each other on prime time shows, this gets treated as if it were a matter of great consequence.
It was not always this way. There was a time when excellent investigative stories appeared in our newspapers and there was fine reportage to be seen on television, but this is rare these days. There are those who like to believe that it is because of government pressure that there has been such a decline in the media but in my view they are wrong. We are guilty of lazy journalism. And we have forgotten that we are supposed to be writing that first draft of history and to do this involves taking real issues more seriously than the shenanigans of political leaders.
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