Journalism of courage has always been the leitmotif running through the history of this great newspaper. Much before The Indian Express chose to deliver this promise of fearless, uncompromising journalism—what the ad world calls the “tagline”—this was all its founder demanded of people who worked for him. Solidly inscribed into our DNA, the practice of this promise evolved with the times.
So during the freedom movement, journalism of courage meant Express fighting the British when many other, richer, and apparently more powerful newspapers would rather side with the sahibs. During Quit India, it meant suspending publication rather than accepting censorship. A front-page editorial late Ram Nath Goenka wrote then—one of the rarest of rare occasions when he put his name in his newspaper—sets the agenda for us even today and for all times to come. Headlined “Heart Strings and Purse Strings,” it explained why he would prefer to suspend publication and take losses rather than accept the idea of censorship of a colonial power.
A little over three decades later, the same principle was to come handy when time came to resist censorship—and worse—from our own government of the day, during the Emergency. As his forthcoming biography by this newspaper’s former, and highly respected editor B G Verghese (to be released by Penguin in October this year) will tell you, Ram Nath Goenka never used the power of his newspaper. He always believed that an institution like this was not to be an instrument of power in his hands, but a medium of empowerment for the people of his nation.
Truth, knowledge, impartial and accurate information, he believed, were instruments of empowerment. For, these enabled the citizen to ask the right questions, denied the rulers the luxury of avoiding having to give answers and bridged the gap between people and the establishment.
The idea evolved with the times. I was a journalism student during the Emergency and, after the shock of the first three months was over, you knew which papers had the spine to stand up for their beliefs, which ones did not. On my campus, as I am sure in many others, this is when the Express made its mark.
Soon, as you began to scan the the Express for flashes of defiance, sometimes open, like blank spaces in place of editorials that censors had stopped, and sometimes clever, like a tiny obituary in the Classifieds that moaned the “death of liberty, mother of hope, faith and justicia,” it was easy to see why this paper was different.
I was among those fortunate ones who entered journalism, and in fact The Indian Express, just as the Emergency ended. For those of us, cub reporters then, it was a heady feeling when people pumped your hands in awe, and said, oh, you work at the Express. Such a courageous paper!
But courage, in those innocent days, had a simpler definition. Usually, it meant making sure you got the story others won’t bother to reach and telexing it back somehow in days of poor communication. Or exposing a wrong and moving on to the next story, a heady hit-and-run that required courage, intellect, but did not demand that the story be taken to its logical conclusion, with a redressal for the victims, punishment to the guilty.
Until the paper attempted to do just that under one more of my very illustrious predecessors, Arun Shourie, who discovered the instrument of the PIL to follow up on stories like the Bhagalpur blindings. From merely fighting an authoritarian state, journalism of courage was now exposing and taking on its many limbs and instruments that were autocratic and unaccountable anyway. It was with this journalism that the Express then combined with higher judiciary to empower some of the poorest and weakest sections of our society to seek justice.
India’s mediascape was now changing rapidly. Newspapers were being seen more as mere products, the market-place was being re-defined, the rules of the game being re-written, and we were told the basic job of a newspaper was to entertain, amuse, even titillate. Also, that with the decline of the Congress, the politics of the country was too fragmented, instead of one establishment to take on, there were now several. Instead of the notebook, background interviews, anonymous sources, painstaking research, investigative journalism’s new tool became the spycamera: switch it on, record the dirt, pack in both titillation and entertainment, hit Play.
Journalism of courage has always been the leitmotif running through the history of this great newspaper. Much before The Indian Express chose to deliver this promise of fearless, uncompromising journalism—what the ad world calls the “tagline”—this was all its founder demanded of people who worked for him. Solidly inscribed into our DNA, the practice of this promise evolved with the times.