One of the more exciting industries of the decade has surely been the media one. Not just from the point of view of growth — with newspaper/magazine sales rising from Rs 7,000 crore in 2000 to Rs 19,500 crore in 2008, its growth has been better than the power sector, oil and gas, textiles and FMCG, though worse than refineries, steel and the automobile sector. And, unlike mature western democracies, readership levels are rising here.
What made it the media’s decade, of course, goes beyond the growth in top line sales to the view that the only body which can move a thoroughly rotten system is the media. Whether it was the Tehelka tapes of 2001 or the gunning down of Jessica Lal or the Nitish Katara murder, a relentless media ensured that the government did things the right way. In the Jessica Lal case, the killers who were let off due to lack of evidence, were brought to trial once again. And if, after 19 years, former Haryana Director General of Police SPS Rathore is finally sentenced for molesting Ruchika Girotra and filing all manner of police cases against her brother and then torturing him (all of which drove her to suicide), it will only be due to media pressure — that the entire political and bureaucratic class in Haryana covered up all this time tells you just how deep the rot is. The list goes on.
In terms of exposing corruption, once again, it has been media campaigns that made the difference. While the highest in the government kept quiet as telecom minister A Raja was gifting away Rs 50,000 crore to a select few firms, it was the media that highlighted and pursued the scandal. The vigilance commission came into the picture later. When the Delhi airport’s owners were trying to diddle the government of its share of revenue, it was the media pressure that forced the government to act to reduce this somewhat. Ditto for the allegations on Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) padding its KG Basin costs. After incorrectly stating that the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) had found nothing wrong, the head of the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons (DGH) had to backtrack and ask CAG to audit the accounts. Later, the DGH head had to leave after the media said he’d accepted a flat from RIL — while the government is probing the charge, he was refused the extension which was a certainty till then. This list, too, goes on.
The media, of course, has traditionally been seen as a check when the executive, the judiciary and the legislature have failed to deliver, but what has changed is that the traditional protectors have become more effete. Parliament functions less and less with each passing day. While the Lok Sabha sat for 151 days in 1956, this fell to 64 days in 2009; Budget discussions lasted for 140 hours in 1986 and this fell to 60 hours in 2006 and 2007, and then rose to 95 hours in 2009; 27 per cent of Bills were passed in just five minutes last year and, on an average, just nine MPs participated per Bill passed. As for the judiciary, just between June and September last year, the number of pending cases in the Supreme Court rose from 52,592 to 53,221, and the total number of pending cases in various high courts is 40,18,914! As for the executive, cases like Ruchika and Raja make it clear just what it is capable of. Also, believe it or not, the size of government in areas that matter is small compared to other countries and, in terms of share of GDP, this has fallen from 12.9 per cent in 1999-2000 to 11.1 per cent in 2008-09. This explains the inability to deliver, whether it is water, electricity or even justice. Naturally then, people in distress turn to the media.
The problem here is that, while the media may do a great job, this is almost always subjective and, more often than not, guided by the People Like Us syndrome — how often were the victims at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminal recalled in the Mumbai terrorist attack in comparison to those at the Taj and the Oberoi? On other occasions, as in the Aarushi Talwar murder case, the media convicted her parents, forcing the CBI to arrest her father for several weeks.
No civilised society, and certainly not one hoping to become a great power over the next few decades, can hope to work with sporadic justice. The media’s justice may have, to use a recent example, got aged historian Lotika Sarkar her house back after a policeman and his wife said she had gifted it to them, but it was the Lucknow High Court verdict in the Anil Ambani Dadri power project case a few weeks ago that determined lakhs of farmers across the country cannot just be evicted from their property by a government using emergency powers which prevent them from even voicing their dissent. That is, the fourth estate cannot possibly equal the power of the other estates when they function well. This was the media’s decade, but for all the wrong reasons.