Innehållsförteckning för December 2018 från The Caravan

“Did you know all our Tehelka stories are gone?” I asked a friend and former colleague from my time at the magazine. As the words hung in the air, I saw his face fluctuate between the shock and horror that had dawned on me just a few weeks before. In mid-August, I had settled down with my laptop to tackle the tedious task of updating my résumé. A handful of my Tehelka stories have been a fixture since I left the magazine in early 2014. It had been my first job—I was tossed into the deep end of reporting and expected to teach myself to swim—and I had produced some of my best work as a rookie journalist. I clicked on the links that I had stored for years, but…

IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED INDEPENDENCE, a certain kind of puritanism entered All India Radio, out of which Doordarshan was later formed. The first information minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, had already issued a diktat against providing employment in broadcasting to those whose “private life was a public scandal.” This rule, though never applied to men, banned an entire generation of talented courtesans and artists from a promising platform. The emergence of television in the shadow of this paternalistic developmental state was one of the factors that led to the Indian government’s dominance over television media and the latter’s preoccupation with access. Besides attempts to popularise the government’s welfare programmes, there was little thought given to the enormous possibilities offered by the media. The Chanda Committee set up by Indira Gandhi,…

IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE TORRIJOS–CARTER TREATIES to transfer control over the Panama Canal on 31 December 1999, General Lawson W Magruder of the United States army hands a symbolic key to the Panamanian president Ernesto Perez at Fort William Davis. Signed in 1977 by the US president Jimmy Carter and Omar Torrijos, the military dictator of Panama, the treaties mandated that the area around the canal would remain “permanently neutral.” This necessitated the withdrawal of the US military presence that had existed in Panama for most of the twentieth century. The first two bases—Fort William Davis and Fort Espinar—were handed over on 2 September 1995. Construction of the canal, which links the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, began in 1880, when Panama was still part of Colombia. However, the French company…

The word “byline” first appeared about a century ago in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises. Over time, for idealists among us, the byline came to represent the power of journalism—the courage it provided an ordinary reporter to challenge the high and mighty. As a young journalist, this was the sort of byline I aspired for, whose sanctity, I believed, was to be doggedly protected by editors. Over my career, I have watched the byline die a slow and violent death. It has been killed not only by power-hungry politicians and corporate barons, but also by media owners and their servile editors. More than a decade ago, I opened a folder in my email called “Morgue.” I began saving in it stories I had written that met journalistic standards…

ON THE NIGHT OF 5 AUGUST, a couple of dozen men turned up at Shahidul Alam’s house in Dhaka. They dragged him from his apartment, bound and screaming, smashing surveillance cameras on the way out. A few family members and friends who lived in nearby apartments heard thuds, shouting and the screech of tyres. Alam’s partner, Rahnuma Ahmed, was with a neighbour, so she could not react in time. By the time anyone fully realised what was going on, Alam had been thrown into a white van and driven off into the night’s darkness. When they rushed downstairs and reached the spot where the vehicle had stood, there was only the dust the van had kicked up. The timing, the men and the van all seemed to suggest one thing—that…

The “unmanageable” editor is a vanishing breed in India. Most of India’s political class, including the central and state governments and their opposition parties, finds strong, independent editors undesirable. Corporate bosses remain disdainful of professional editors. Owners of media houses, who handpick pliant journalists, are most unhappy if an editor turns out to have an intrepid streak. Even within news organisations, colleagues prefer to have a weakling at the helm. The absence of an editor who has a mind of her own suits all those who define our zeitgeist. Over the years, with the corporatisation of the media and the advent of the media-savvy politician, unmanageable editors have been replaced by managers. Not long ago, Indian media was defined by strong editors—Durga Das, Frank Moraes, S Mulgaonkar and, in recent…

{ONE} SHOBHANA BHARTIA CULTIVATES an image of herself in the mould of Katharine Graham. She has brought up her connection to Graham in multiple interviews and public appearances—at an event in 2015, she spoke of “a very deep engagement and a personal bond with Mrs Graham”—and reporters inclined towards stenography have played up the parallels between the two. Bhartia, as the chairperson and editorial director of HT Media, is the publisher of the Hindustan Times—the third most-read English-language newspaper in India, and the most-read one in the country’s capital. Graham was the publisher of the Washington Post, in the US capital, in the 1960s and 1970s. Both inherited control of their newspapers from their families—Graham from her husband; Bhartia from her father, the industrialist KK Birla. As women in positions…

AT FIRST GLANCE, a series of images of spaces—a lush green paddy field, a rickshaw parked next to a steel shed, a wall with Bangla writing on it—may not seem particularly sinister. But, when interspersed with pictures of bank notes, a body covered with a shroud, or a towel folded neatly on the floor, the images acquire a different significance. These photographs are part of a conceptual series by the Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam, called Crossfire. The title refers to the term used in official accounts of extrajudicial killings carried out by the Rapid Action Batallion—a paramilitary force established in 2004 to “curb corruption in Bangladesh”—in alleged encounters with criminals in their custody. Over the past decade, several independent reports by human-rights groups have accused the RAB of several enforced…