Indian Media

Ayaz Amir is a Pakistani columnist and I read his columns in The Dawn regularly. We all know how the leading dailies like Times Of India, Hindustan Times are getting totally crappy these days. It kind of hurts when the truth is reiterated by someone from across the border. This is what Amir has to say about our print media.

Entire regions of India — UP, Bihar, to name only two states — are
in the grip of serious lawlessness and there is not much that
anyone has been able to do about it. But sitting in Delhi or
reading the Indian press you won't get this impression. Only when
something out-of-the-ordinary happens, a high profile killing, for
instance — although in India's wild east even this is no longer
surprising — does it figure in the headlines, otherwise not.

There is a full-fledged insurgency in the northeast — Mizoram,
Nagaland, Manipur, etc — but you won't get to know much about it
if your sole source of information is the Indian press.

More serious than these two problems is something potentially more
dangerous. From the Nepal border in the north right down to Andhra
Pradesh in the south, a wide swathe of territory almost cutting
through this huge country is in the effective control not of any
government, central or state, but the Naxalite movement. This is a
mind-boggling circumstance, about 160 districts of the country —
the total number of districts in Pakistan being 105 — outside
governmental control. But again the Naxalite movement doesn't
figure much in Indian discourse.

True, India's stability or integrity is not under threat. India's
very size is the biggest shock absorber of all, its capacity to
absorb problems of this nature or magnitude commensurate with its
bulk. Still, to insist, or convey the impression, that nothing
troubles the Indian heartland is to close one's eyes to reality.
As already stated, the Indian media performs this pigeon act very
successfully.