Speeches / Statements

Keynote Address by MoS Dr. Shashi Tharoor at the 18th AMIC Annual Conference

16/07/2009

Chair of the session H.E Dr Abdul Waheed Khan, Assistant Director General of UNESCO,
Prof Binod Agrawal, Vice Chancellor, Himgiri Nabh Vishwavidyalaya
Dr Ang Peng Hwa, Chairman, AMIC
Dr Indrajit Banerjee, Secretary-General, AMIC
Distinguished experts and guests,
Representatives of media both from India and abroad,
Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends I hope that covers everyone

1. It is indeed a great honour for me to be here with you this afternoon. I would like to thank the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre, AMIC, for extending the invitation to me and bestowing on me the honour to speak to this distinguished gathering. I would like to compliment AMIC, Professor Ang Peng Hwa and in particular my friend Dr. Indrajit Banerjee on organizing this Conference in New Delhi on a very topical issue. On what we all know is a valedictory occasion for Indrajit, I would like to take this opportunity to warmly felicitate and compliment your outgoing Secretary-General for his enthusiasm, his dynamism and his commitment to the cause of Media and Communications in Asia. The AMIC we see today in many ways bears his personal stamp. I know I speak for you all when I wish him well in his new career at UNESCO.

2. I have been very impressed by the array of speakers and participants at this Conference. I am confident that the various plenaries and parallel sessions of the Conference over the last few days have produced papers and discussions with rich substance and high relevance on topics of interest to academics and practitioners alike - including media and democracy, media and gender, media and cultural identity, and current trends in the international media industry. I am sure that the Conference has also provided a valuable opportunity for all of you to interact informally.

Mr. Chairman,

3. I am conscious that I am addressing you as your Conference draws to a close on its fourth day today. I would have personally much preferred to learn from the renowned experts representing a multitude of disciplines gathered here rather than inflict another lecture on you. Unfortunately the tyranny of my schedule did not permit me to listen to you all and I am therefore speaking without the benefit of having heard the learned views of some of the best known experts and professionals in the spheres of media, government and development. I feel rather like a fisherman rising to deliver a lecture on the whale and discovering that Jonah is in the audience – and what’s more, has already spoken! I know there are many Jonahs in this audience and I apologize to them in advance.

4. But now to say that media occupy a significant place in our lives, especially in a democracy, would be an understatement. Many of us are aware of Thomas Carlyle’s reference to Edmund Burke turning his head to the press gallery in Parliament and saying: “…in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important [by] far than they all.” And the “they all” stood for the other three Estates! If media commanded that level of prominence when Edmund Burke spoke of it in the 18th century - when the wheels of the industrial revolution had just turned and when there was no television, no internet, no twitter, neither landlines nor mobile phones, and when the total circulation of newspapers in Britain, printed probably only in one language, would have been insignificant compared to today’s – then one can well imagine the impact media has in our lives now when large chunks of the human population are literally just a click away from one another. Any doubt that I might have had about the reach and influence of global mass communications was dispelled for years ago in my UN days when I happened to be in St. Petersburg, Russia, for a conference and was approached by a Tibetan Buddhist monk in his saffron robes, thumping a cymbal and chanting his mantras, who paused in his chanting to say: "I've seen you on BBC!" New communications technology has clearly shrunk the world, and in the real sense made it all one.

5. The most significant aspect of the media from the point of view of the subject of this Conference is its relation with, and contribution to, democracy. Simply put, democracy is impossible without free media. Press freedom is both the mortar that binds together the bricks of democracy and it’s also an open window embedded in those bricks. Democracy and free media constitute two sides of the same coin. It is this centrality which led Thomas Jefferson to say famously, and I quote: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.” Unquote. I am not sure how solidly I agree with that, but

6. This Jeffersonian view of the criticality of free media for the existence of democracy is something India can attest to from our experience. Our national movement, our freedom struggle, itself saw several publications, such as Mahatma Gandhi’s Young India and Harijan, and the Jugantar of Shri Aurobindo, inspiring millions to join the struggle for independence. Moreover, these and other similar publications inculcated and fostered the democratic values and principles which independent India has come to champion. It is on this foundation which rests the edifice of the freedom of expression, guaranteed as a fundamental right in our Constitution, and zealously protected by its practitioners and guardians.

7. The idea of freedom of expression, which includes freedom of press and other media, did not come to us in India as a mere import from the West. Freedom of expression had been integral to Indian civilization and to the ever ongoing synthesis amongst its various traditions. Our Constitution codified what had been the essence of the Indian civilization: the freedom to express life in all its diverse manifestations. Diversity is central to the Indian experience; and diversity cannot be preserved without the freedom to say this is who we are, this is what matters to us, this is what we want to be. Freedom of expression and therefore of media is therefore fundamental to India’s constitutional democracy.

Mr. Chairman,

8. It is the diversity of India which expresses itself through an almost mind-boggling array of publications and audio-visual media today. In independent India, the soil has been fertile and the climate propitious for the media to play a key role in nurturing and buttressing both democracy and development, and at the same time to bloom in the form of more than a thousand flowers. At a time when media around the world is in a state of contraction amidst the financial crisis, India is a rare exception where all forms of media are growing. Newspapers are fading in the West but flourishing in India; television and radio are extending their broadcast reach; and the internet is slowly penetrating a growing percentage of Indian households. Today, more than 65,000 newspapers and periodicals are registered for publication in 123 languages and dialects. The total circulation of just about 8,500 of the largest of these 65,000 was more than 180 million. There are some states (such as Orissa and Maharashtra) which publish newspapers in more than one dozen of the twenty two languages listed in the Eight Schedule of the Constitution. While there are more than one hundred private TV channels, the widest reach is with Doordarshan, which has five national and eleven regional language channels. Now, in 1947, when we won our independence All India Radio, or AIR, had six stations covering 2.5% of the country’s area and 11% of its population. Today, it has 225 broadcast centres covering over 99% of the population through its programmes in 22 Indian languages. And its broadcasts also reach over 100 countries in 15 foreign languages.

9. Now, while these numbers give some indication of the high status and prominence enjoyed by media in Indian democracy, the real and full facts of its centrality lie behind these figures. Many of you are familiar with the metaphor of the media as the canary in the mine-shaft – the bird lowered into the depths to test the levels of oxygen at the bottom of the coalmine. Our canary continues to breathe and even to sing, so perhaps I could instead use a different medical metaphor. We in India have seen media, in different contexts, as a doctor’s mirror in which the patient sees a reflection of reality; as a diagnostic tool – a sort of MRI scan which, in the hands of an expert professional, has the potential to lay bare a hidden problem; and also, occasionally, as a scalpel – as if the radiologist sometimes decides to assume the role of a surgeon as well.

10. Apart from being a watchdog of public interest, the media acts as a two-way conduit between the people and those who have the responsibility for their governance and development. This is, arguably, the most important role of one media in a democratic developing country like ours. Media keeps the citizens engaged in governance by disseminating information, educating and mobilizing public opinion, and thus facilitating the active participation of citizens in democracy. But it should be remembered that media does not just reflect public opinion, it shapes it. When the media is engaged, the public is engaged. The media shapes our awareness of events and, by so doing, sometimes shapes events themselves. Events that the media ignores find it difficult to obtain traction in the modern world; events that the media focuses on, on the other hand, become impossible even for powerful Governments to ignore.

11. A complementary role of media is to act as a channel for feedback or information for the policy makers and administrators on the need for action in a particular sphere. To borrow the term used by our great Nobel laureate Prof Amartya Sen, the media acts as “the best early warning system” bringing out information that can have a significant impact on policies and programmes. “Information and critical public discussion are an inescapably important requirement of good public policy,” he writes. It is this role of the media which has made government more responsive and accountable in many countries and I am proud to say in my own. While free media is essential for all countries, we in India think it is even more important in developing countries because the challenge of development requires challenges from the public through the media. In India, the persistence of an inquisitive press has also made public servants more accustomed, and more open, to their presence, thereby promoting the notion of a partnership for the greater common good.

12. Press freedom is also a precondition for economic and social progress. Many of you are familiar with Amartya Sen’s famous argument that there has never been a famine in a democracy with a free press. Famines are the result of a lack of access to food, and Sen has proved, with extensive research, that they occur only when the media is not free to draw attention to the problem. Press freedom is also essential to generating awareness about development, about the environment, about education and about critical health issues like HIV/AIDS. And it continues to be a major building block in constructing governance that is people-centered, inclusive and progressive.

13. The new hallmarks of development are the ability to receive, download and send information through electronic networks, and the capacity to share information - including not only newspapers and journals, but also on-line web sites - without restriction. This is why censorship is so unwise; indeed, it is anti-development. For developing countries need to open up to the outside world, liberalize their mass media, and resist government control and censorship of information, if they are to be able to take advantage of the opportunities that the information revolution has made available to the world.

14. A corollary to the media’s role in good governance is its advocacy of inclusiveness. The media has and usually discharges the responsibility to bring the marginalized and the issues of their concern into the mainstream of public debate. A byproduct of this focus is the role media can and do perform in either building or promoting a consensus on key social and economic issues, or in highlighting a basic common denominator, where there is discord and conflict.

15. Now, so far I have been speaking about the news media. But even entertainment television educates people – children and adults – through the values it espouses in its popular shows. Television entertainment teaches about culture, about society, about history, about interpersonal relationships. It helps a society define itself.

16. It may surprise some that I speak of mass entertainment television as an educational medium. Groucho Marx once said that he found television enormously educational, because whenever anyone turned on a TV set, he went into another room and read a book. Now, doubtless there are people who imagine that educational entertainment television is an oxymoron. I suspect these are the same people who say that the reason television is called a medium is because it is neither rare nor well done.

17. And yet there is no escaping television’s reach and influence in every democracy. The question isn’t whether TV teaches, it’s what it teaches. Media can reinforce existing stereotypes, or build new positive ones. You can denigrate and dismiss cultures that are different from the mainstream. Or it can celebrate diversity.

18. To the broadcasters in this room, let me say this: As the custodians of the airwaves, you can choose to be purveyors of weapons of mass distraction. Or you can choose to be builders of a better world.

Mr. Chairman,

19. Our topic speaks of the media, democracy and governance in a digital age, and I haven’t yet mentioned the Internet. There is no doubt that the internet can be a democratizing tool. In some parts of the world, certainly in most of the West, it has already become one, since large amounts of information are now accessible to almost anyone.

20. But a person’s means of access to information has long served as a way by which you could determine his or her wealth – perhaps merely by glancing at the watch on their wrist. That is a source of information about a person. And the stark reality of the world today is that you can tell the rich from the poor by their Internet connections.

21. Today, the poverty line is linked to the high-speed digital line, the fibre optic line…. all the lines that exclude those who are literally not plugged in to the possibilities of our new world. There is a marked gap between the technological haves and have-nots – between those who know, and those who don’t – both between cultures and within them. This gap has come to be called the digital divide.

22. To put it simply, thus far, the information revolution, unlike the French Revolution, is a revolution with a lot of liberty, some fraternity, and no equality.

23. I am sure that in the deliberations over the last four days, the distinguished participants in this Conference have discussed and delineated the contours of the emerging paradigms relating to media, democracy and governance. As a person associated with governance, and often coming into interaction with media, may I say that the role of media in democracy and development, which I have briefly touched upon, leads me to surmise that it is the common man, the aam aadmi, as my Party likes to call them who holds the touchstone for the relevance, correctness and utility of any evolving paradigm in this area. Success of media both as a commercial venture and as a tool capable of moulding public discourse and policies, in my view, hinges and will continue to hinge on how it touches the life of the aam aadmi, the common man.

24. It is this belief, which brings me, Mr. Chairman, to the last of the points I wanted to make. I am sure the Conference has already addressed and discussed issues such as the inclusiveness issue implications of the competitive market and excessive commercialization on the quality and type of content and focus of media. This is particularly relevant for audio-visual media, which has real time reach. It may be due to this that all the time something is “breaking” on the airwaves in my country (in the form of ‘breaking news’), turn on the TV in India you cannot go 5 mins. without seeing something ‘breaking’, making us almost believe that something earth-shattering is happening somewhere all the time. All too often, the sensational prevails over the substantial; after all, in the US, it is said, “if it bleeds, its leads”. But we have to pause and ask: Does so much focus on ‘breaking’ leave enough space for ‘constructing’ through deeper and wider coverage and analysis? What serves the aam admi better: bits of information which may not be relevant or retainable the minute after, or a full picture on the issues of his concern? Should dramatizing or “dumbing down” the news in a quest for ratings points carry a premium over serious reporting? Should tight purses, particularly in difficult economic times, necessarily lead to “infotainment”, driving a shift in the focus away from what matters to the common man? Is there a danger that the media, in its quest to attract eyeballs, can drive public policy in a dangerous direction, for instance by stoking national chauvinism or jingoism on international questions where a more measured approach might be wiser? Or is there a middle ground, a way out, perhaps a harder way?

Ladies and Gentlemen,

25. Like all good and important questions, these may not have simple and straightforward answers and I am not going to venture any to you today. I would merely point out what India’s first Prime Minster Pandit Nehru had said, and I quote, “Freedom brings responsibilities…and we have to face them in the spirit of a free and disciplined people.” Unquote. I am sure that the Conference has discussed such issues. I am also hopeful that the deliberations of the Conference will point to the best possible answers. Meanwhile, let me reiterate that democracy, development and government on one hand and the media on the other continue to benefit in India from their symbiotic relationship. On our part, we in the government are committed to upholding the highest ideals and guarantees of freedom of expression that our Constitution enshrines.

Mr. Chairman,

26. The prospective benefits of the information age are clear; in a nutshell, we now have a powerful tool to address the disadvantages of under-development, of isolation, of poverty and of the lack of political accountability and political freedom.

27. But these benefits will only be made manifest when the entrances and exits to the digital information superhighway are open to everyone, when they are mapped and signposted in such a way as to allow everyone to know where they need to go, and when the road itself is suitable for all manner of vehicles, from sports cars to trams, and from rickshaws to bicycles. Access to information, in other words, is of paramount importance in a democracy.

28. Pandit Nehru had once said, “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” Unquote. I would wish and pray that media remain our eyes for leading us from falsehood to truth, and from darkness to light – asato ma sadgamay, tamaso ma jyotirgamaya. After all the human mind is like a parachute – it functions effectively only when it is open.

29. So with these parting words, I would like to once again thank the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre for giving me the honour and privilege of speak in this distinguished gathering today. And I hope you have all had a wonderful Conference.

I thank you all for your attention.

Thank you.