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00:00:18of
00:00:29of
00:00:32of He's been a journalist, a
00:00:36of political commentator, a political strategist, senior
00:00:40advisor to the Indian ministry of information and broadcasting, Kanchan
00:00:43Gupta. Welcome to India, Russia and the world. Thank you. You're
00:00:47actually the first guest on my
00:00:49in podcast since the end
00:00:51of the cockroach protest that led to the resignation of India's
00:00:55education minister. Purely from an optics
00:00:59perspective. what kind of message did these
00:01:02protests send out to the
00:01:04of world? there is no doubt
00:01:07that the protest by
00:01:10itself was not
00:01:13unexpected, but the the manner in in
00:01:17which it unfolded 20th July
00:01:20onwards,
00:01:22of that took the government by surprise because that kind of share
00:01:25violence against the police, the
00:01:29police...
00:01:31of using force to push back the protesters, that
00:01:34made the situation very sticky for
00:01:38government, and you couldn't turn your eyes away,
00:01:42now you said which led to the resignation
00:01:47of of the education minister, technically the education minister resigned
00:01:50to ensure
00:01:53of that the situation wouldn't get worse, and
00:01:57if you read his resignation, he gives the
00:02:01reasons why he resigned, so I wouldn't say
00:02:05that it's because these people held
00:02:08of a gun to the government's head that the education
00:02:12minister resigned, but
00:02:15whatever be the interpretation, the
00:02:19fact is that there was a protest
00:02:23and for the first time there was a
00:02:26glimpse into the world view
00:02:29of the minds escape of what i call the
00:02:33gen z generation,
00:02:36so what, what do these kids think about, how do they
00:02:40look at life, what are their many
00:02:43of angsts, what do they, what do they worry
00:02:47of about, and what angers them,
00:02:50perhaps none of us, whether in government or not
00:02:54in government, we never looked at them very
00:02:57closely, you know what I really want to. ask you the genzy
00:03:01protest in India, do you think that there were any parallels with what it
00:03:05happened say
00:03:06in a Bangladesh or Nepal? no, I will very quickly explain to
00:03:09you why, our politics has been of
00:03:12a different variety, our politics has been of
00:03:16accomodative nature, our politicians are very
00:03:20sharp, don't forget that
00:03:23Mohandas Gandhi was one
00:03:25of the sharpest politicians India has produced, back
00:03:29of their mind,
00:03:30they always have the more serious and the more informed among
00:03:34them, they
00:03:34a have Gandhi in their back in the back
00:03:36of their minds, they know when to step forward, they know when to stand
00:03:40still and they know when
00:03:40of to step back. number two, we have very layered
00:03:44society, so
00:03:45in a layered society like us, that kind of
00:03:49change
00:03:50of doesn't happen.
00:03:51our young
00:03:52are politically
00:03:54too diverse, they are culturally too
00:03:57diverse, they are...
00:04:01linguistically to diverse and
00:04:04of definitely in there is no single religion holding them
00:04:07together, but what is there in common
00:04:11to those who believe in this is the
00:04:15of civilizational inheritance which they have, and that is of being
00:04:19a people who are accommodative, who
00:04:23are inclusive and who are not
00:04:26of exclusionary,
00:04:27of okay, so whether you see in Bangladesh, Nepal. Sri
00:04:30Lanka, wherever this has happened, the Arab countries, the
00:04:34so-called Arab spring, it is
00:04:36of because
00:04:36of the
00:04:37of the exclusionism
00:04:39of the elite
00:04:40of the ruling classes, it is because
00:04:44of the in your face corruption, even corruption in
00:04:48India is very layered, so it's a different thing, I
00:04:51mean right, so it it won't work over here, what about
00:04:55the media coverage
00:04:57of the cockroach genzi protests in India? on one hand,
00:05:01the local media was being criticized for being too soft, the
00:05:05western media for being too
00:05:07of celebratory, what is your take? well, there was nothing called
00:05:10a local media. Yeah, I, I find it aborent
00:05:14that there should have been an attempt to
00:05:18malign mainstream media in such a
00:05:22gross manner as we saw happening over there at janta
00:05:25manta. You mean the journalist getting hackled, journalist getting
00:05:29hackled, then this whole use the term godi media, now
00:05:32such terms were never hurled at the media earlier, but
00:05:36you don't think the media is it fault here? No, listen, I mean, I, I
00:05:40may agree with. "the
00:05:44editorial policy of media house, I may disagree with
00:05:47it, I may agree with individuals, I may disagree with
00:05:51them, but I wouldn't ever go to the
00:05:54extent of labeling anybody
00:05:57godhi or, like for instance, I never use the
00:06:01term anti-national, because I i don't
00:06:05think I have enough intelligence to
00:06:08judge someone's nationalist or
00:06:11non-nationalist. entials: so this kind
00:06:14of labelling and this kind of
00:06:17demonizing is bad. the so-called digital media
00:06:21took over the space over
00:06:25there. television comes under some amount of accountability.
00:06:28print definitely comes under lot of
00:06:31accountability, and but the digital media, there is no
00:06:35accountability
00:06:36at all, and that i think is not a very happy
00:06:39situation, and
00:06:41I am okay with... editorial perceptions or
00:06:44editorial interpretations, even okay with
00:06:47agenda, but so long as that agenda is known to
00:06:51be agenda and not as some great journalism as
00:06:55it is being made out to be. what about the western media's
00:06:58coverage these
00:06:59of protests? it's been gastly as usual.
00:07:03someone today actually pointed
00:07:05out to that the New York
00:07:09Times has till now carried only one
00:07:12story on the enormous protests happening
00:07:16in Pakistan occupied Kashmir where more than
00:07:2040 protesters have been killed by the Pakistani Army
00:07:24and they have carried 16 stories till now
00:07:28on the jantar manter protest various aspects of it of
00:07:31course so this is something which always
00:07:34intrigues me that there
00:07:37is some kind of a
00:07:41system in place. which rewards
00:07:44the the monsterization of
00:07:48India and we saw this happening during the second phase of
00:07:52covid if you remember
00:07:54when that we burn our dead
00:07:58is not some great secret which was
00:08:01kept locked away from the world all these years only if you don't know India enough
00:08:05you would so yes
00:08:08we were dead so there were actually drown videos of
00:08:12of. bodies being burned that were cited as how
00:08:15gustly the situation is that you have to burn and
00:08:19get rid of bodies and all these people were then
00:08:23rewarded with the police, but that's how it rolls, I
00:08:26mean you can get away with it in India, but you
00:08:30cannot, there's a price to be paid, but is that India's
00:08:34fault, why, why would this happen in
00:08:37India, meaning the covid example you were giving, people
00:08:41were dying. over the world, but the
00:08:45western media, the western journalists, they would just
00:08:49hop around hospitals, inside hospitals, indian hospitals, precisely,
00:08:53there is there's there's a disbalance between the way they look at the
00:08:57world, like they wouldn't ever
00:09:00show photos their dead, the
00:09:04they could wouldn't even mention that they have run out of space to
00:09:08bury their dead, at least we were burning our dead, and they did...
00:09:12didn't have space to bury their dead and they were just stacking them up in
00:09:16meat trucks. mean, how is it that we were worse
00:09:20off? now, having said that, this
00:09:24is not something which is entirely new,
00:09:27and this is India has faced this problem
00:09:31again and again, India faced this problem with the
00:09:34guardian, India faced this problem with the BBC,
00:09:38BBC had to be shut down over here, the guardian corresponded.
00:09:42was frock marched to what was then Savd Jang
00:09:46airport and put on the first flight out. I mean, you just could
00:09:50not deal with them because they were so intransigent in
00:09:54their operations over here. Why does the western media hate
00:09:58India? You know, during the cold war,
00:10:02new information order emerged in the world, and
00:10:06all these media houses, whether they
00:10:09were public broadcasters or... or private
00:10:13media, they became instruments of
00:10:17governments and all these
00:10:20institutions which were earlier set up, mean DW
00:10:24was set up to cater to Germans, not to
00:10:28Indians, similarly BBC was meant for
00:10:32Britain
00:10:33and it was meant for British subjects or British
00:10:36citizens abroad, but during
00:10:40the cold war they chose to become instruments of state
00:10:44policy and their audience therefore
00:10:48changed and from domestic it became
00:10:50international and now of course the...
00:10:55story goes that because the
00:10:58domestic demand and audience and market is
00:11:01shrinking then you they need new ones, money is
00:11:05tied so they are looking at India as a market etc etc.
00:11:09but that's really that's i mean it's
00:11:13fine with me, mean i don't care, but i think at
00:11:17some point foreign media needs to also
00:11:20revisit its
00:11:22own. ethical standards,
00:11:26it's, I won't say morals, but at least ethical standards
00:11:29and how each day they violate
00:11:33them, and how it ultimately hurts their own
00:11:37credibility, even back home, nobody takes the New York Times
00:11:40seriously, nobody takes BBC seriously,
00:11:44nobody takes the Washington Post seriously, look at where are these
00:11:47papers, we have RT as an alt media, now
00:11:51I have a question there, India's long complain
00:11:55about the coverage it gets in in the western
00:11:59media, so the UK
00:12:03has a BBC, Russia has RT,
00:12:06Australia has ABC, why
00:12:10doesn't India have a platform, of course there is DD,
00:12:13but not to level where India's voice can be
00:12:17heard a global stage,
00:12:19Doordarshan Prasad Bharti is an
00:12:23autonomous body to be f functioning its own,
00:12:27but the fact that it is a state
00:12:30broadcaster remains a
00:12:33reality. in our idea of concept of a
00:12:37state broadcaster, the purposes of state
00:12:41broadcasting, the ideal audience for state
00:12:44broadcasting and how to use
00:12:47these instruments remain
00:12:50defined in a certain manner, those
00:12:54definitions. are the traditional conservative
00:12:57definitions of of any state
00:13:00broadcaster, but as I said, during the cold
00:13:04war, government started using their state
00:13:07broadcasters, all these people then became a
00:13:11part the cold war
00:13:14information system, and therefore their audience
00:13:18changed from the local to the
00:13:21foreign, and increasingly they started... focusing
00:13:25on that because there was greater
00:13:28individual interest in that, it was much more
00:13:32fun going and doing a story on on the Vatican
00:13:36city by by by by
00:13:39placing condomes over there and saying see this is the
00:13:43real,
00:13:44and then you get found out and you have egg on your face, but nothing
00:13:47happens. I don't think Doordarshan would ever want to do it, should it
00:13:51be doing it? I think yes, Doordarshan. and all
00:13:55India radio should should break free
00:13:59of those traditions. when operations sindur happen,
00:14:03India had to send delegations to different parts the world to just
00:14:07conway what India's perspective and point
00:14:11of you was, if there was dd around the world and if people could just switch
00:14:14on and heard India's perspective,
00:14:18would that not make things like much easier? yes,
00:14:22but also no. my journey begins. 1982 and
00:14:26I have seen the fashioning and refashioning the
00:14:30world information order on how the white
00:14:33west controls the information order
00:14:37and there is inbuilt bias
00:14:41in it, a white man's paper
00:14:45will always carry greater cloud than a black
00:14:48man's paper or a brown man's paper, that's a
00:14:52fact even today, even today it would get.
00:14:57That's my question,
00:14:58why doesn't India do something about it? I think I think it is happening
00:15:02now, and I
00:15:04think younger journalists are
00:15:08now, they feel more confident, maybe my generation
00:15:12was not that confident of of being able to take them
00:15:15on, but today they are, you think the gensies will
00:15:19take them on? No, no, not even genzies, I
00:15:22mean, "you are
00:15:26there, everything doesn't have to devolve
00:15:29to gens, to gens, I get it, I mean, they will at best be reinventing the
00:15:33wheel, but the wheel is being invented right
00:15:37now, the kind of
00:15:40stuff which you are doing, the kind of stuff
00:15:44which other journalists are doing, and
00:15:48I think young women have
00:15:52shown greater courage in doing
00:15:55this, but what about the other side, journalists in India, they
00:15:59face UAPA, YouTubers have faced
00:16:03Firs, then there are x accounts being withheld on government
00:16:07order. was do you think that criticism the
00:16:10government is increasingly being mistaken for being
00:16:14anti-national? this is a common
00:16:17misperception.
00:16:20a, i don't think you can show
00:16:24me buring the odd case where
00:16:28the union government, the central
00:16:31government has actually filed cases
00:16:35against journalists.
00:16:38whether under any part the law,
00:16:42everybody says that, oh, there is
00:16:46a squeeze on free press, there is a squeeze
00:16:49on free speech that that the press
00:16:53is being throttled, expression is
00:16:57being throttled, speech is being throttled, and you are saying
00:17:01all that sitting here in Delhi or in
00:17:05India fearlessly with... without any fear
00:17:08of any government action
00:17:12for saying this, man, you don't know what it meant,
00:17:16what what censorship means under Indian law,
00:17:19yeah, under Indian law, under Indian
00:17:23constitution, what censorship really means like,
00:17:26and my generation remembers it from the emergency
00:17:30years, what do you think the increasing presence of RT in
00:17:34the region, do you think it balances the western?
00:17:37media coverage of South Asia to a certain
00:17:40extent? first of all, i think RT should
00:17:44drop the use the term south asia, that is purely a
00:17:48state department coinage, us state department
00:17:52coinage, you should not use, what should rt use then? indian
00:17:56subcontinent or whatever, india, pakistan, bangladesh or whatever, but
00:17:59not the south asia bunk, while RT should do what
00:18:03is right in terms of
00:18:07journalistic ethics and values, i think so long as you
00:18:11avoid driving agenda, it
00:18:15should it should go, mean and and please don't fall into this
00:18:19trap, white west media has this preachy
00:18:23pontificating attitude, he doesn't do that,
00:18:26so we know the best on how to run a democracy, we know
00:18:30how best to do this, we know how best to do that, i
00:18:34think this is hate that,
00:18:38being preached to, you and I
00:18:42are this is, so we don't like being preached to, not at
00:18:45all, so I think that would hold for the
00:18:48masses, so you should avoid that. Narendra
00:18:52Modi's instagram video was taken down after which India
00:18:55summoned representatives of meta, of x, of
00:18:59snapchat, what is going any big tech
00:19:02platform, whether it is YouTube, whether it
00:19:05is Facebook. instagram,
00:19:09whatever, they enjoy what is
00:19:12called safe harbor protection, that means
00:19:16they are protected from penal
00:19:18action, for anything that
00:19:22appears on their platform,
00:19:25provided they have not engineered
00:19:29it, provided they have no role in it.
00:19:32okay, now when the platform intervenes in this
00:19:36manner, this is intervention a country's
00:19:39political process and it is
00:19:42unacceptable and that is why these platforms were
00:19:46summoned by the parliamentary standing committee which is
00:19:50headed by Nishikant Dube and I think all them came in
00:19:54the trouped in and they said they
00:19:55were very sorry that this happened
00:19:57it won't happen again etc but rightly they have been told sorry I
00:20:01mean this is violation the safe harbor
00:20:04clause
00:20:06in in the IT act. "you can't just do it and
00:20:09say sorry, and and now I think they have
00:20:12said that Mark Zuckerberg has to has to offer
00:20:16apology, which I think he owes
00:20:18to the prime minister, exactly, Nishikant Dube saying that Mark
00:20:21Zakkaberg was apology, and this was attempt to
00:20:25discredit India, where is this coming from? see, you have
00:20:29to understand where it's coming from, the
00:20:33whole question is what prevails, does the
00:20:36law?" " sovereign law and sovereign rules of
00:20:40India prevail or do the board room
00:20:44rules these big tech companies
00:20:46prevail, so just because Facebook decides
00:20:50that this is acceptable or this is not acceptable, does it
00:20:54mean that the government of India must also accept it? no,
00:20:58okay, it it has to be the other way around. very quick point over
00:21:02here, which I would like to make, lot of people, including sadly
00:21:06Indians think that we have
00:21:09guaranteed absolute
00:21:12free speech in this country. we don't,
00:21:16we don't have free speech, what we have. is
00:21:20conditional speech, people who talk about
00:21:22constitutionalism, they wave a copy the
00:21:26constitution and say free speech is guaranteed here, please read
00:21:30it, my foot, you haven't read it, the first constitution
00:21:33amendment in this country was done in the most
00:21:36unconstitutional manner, it was done by the constituent
00:21:40assembly, not even by an elected parliament, and it
00:21:44changed Ambedkar's clause of free speech into
00:21:48conditional speech, senior advisor to the Indian ministry of information
00:21:52and broadcasting, we recently saw the Indian Prime
00:21:55Minister take to Instagram, he recorded that selfie
00:21:58video, since then we've seen parliamentarians talk in the
00:22:02genzi lingo, what is going
00:22:06on, is there are two parts to
00:22:09it, one is that you will find many them trying
00:22:12to ape the gensy, which
00:22:16I find comical, I mean I cannot become a
00:22:20part the genzy crowd, i can, i can communicate with
00:22:24them, i can be with them, but i cannot be them, of course,
00:22:28okay, that's that's an impossibility, then there are
00:22:31politicians who think that
00:22:33it is good politics to connect with them, and we
00:22:37have to connect with them on their terms, i cannot expect
00:22:41them to connect with me on my terms, so
00:22:45then therefore you have the prime minister shooting his own videos,
00:22:49putting it.
00:22:50I don't know whether he puts it out also, but he definitely shoots it, I know it for
00:22:54fact, he as a smart politician, he realizes that he needs
00:22:58to connect with them, and he is at an advantage, look
00:23:02man, I mean in 2013 he was using
00:23:05google to hold, what were they called now,
00:23:09google meets or something, so he was doing all this in
00:23:1320 11, 2012,
00:23:162013 when Jenzi was not even
00:23:20It stap us, so let's not,
00:23:23let's not mock him for it, by
00:23:272029, the next general elections in
00:23:31India, nearly 30% the voters will
00:23:34be Jenzies, isn't Indian politics
00:23:38bound to change because of that then?
00:23:4165% of India's population was
00:23:4565 or 68% was 35 and below, so we are
00:23:48talking of
00:23:49a of a... demographic profile which was never
00:23:52old, so if if of that
00:23:5668%, say half percentage points are
00:24:00genzy, then it's a very good, it's i think it's very good that this
00:24:03churn is happening, that it brings with it a certain
00:24:07freshness, every
00:24:09republic
00:24:12needs
00:24:14regeneration, because otherwise
00:24:17republics decay, mean history tells
00:24:20us that, so that the best way of regenerating
00:24:24republic, of reaffirming
00:24:27nationhood of
00:24:30reclaiming national
00:24:32identity is to have new
00:24:36generations of people who
00:24:39who are open to change, who think differently, so I would be
00:24:43very happy with it. Vladimir Putin is coming to Delhi in
00:24:47September for the brick summit and this is going to be his. second visit in less
00:24:51than year, each time Mr. Modi and Mr.
00:24:55Putin are together, their photographed together, the
00:24:58western media has a meltdown,
00:25:01why? again, you have to see it, because the cold
00:25:05war is over and done with, but that's
00:25:09what we think, but for them
00:25:12the cold war is still on, so you are either with us or you
00:25:16are against us, this kind of a stark choice. which they
00:25:20insist on exercising,
00:25:23you know, for instance, the coverage the Ukrainian
00:25:27war, I'm not going into the rights or wrongs of
00:25:31it, but the Russia Ukraine conflict or Ukraine Russia
00:25:35conflict, whichever way you want to phrase it is, is not a black
00:25:39and white story as the western media would insist it
00:25:42is, and again there, you are either with us or you are
00:25:46with Russia, that kind of choice make... I
00:25:50don't think works anymore and lot of people may not
00:25:54want to talk about it, they may not want to get entangled
00:25:57with in long debates and discussions over
00:26:01it, but just like you know with
00:26:04China, the world has learned that it's best not to
00:26:08engage a unending debate where you could be debating it till
00:26:12the cows come home, it's best to deal with China the way it is,
00:26:16and you figure out your own way, your own devices to deal with
00:26:20China, so similarly,
00:26:21you know, the world will figure out a way and its own
00:26:25devices to deal with the west,
00:26:28and the white west media at some point
00:26:32the... will find its influence declining. my
00:26:35last question, both India and Russia, they speak of
00:26:39building a multi-polar world. what role can information and
00:26:43broadcasting play in turning that vision
00:26:47into reality? think a lot of countries
00:26:51now believe a multipolar world
00:26:54and the south definitely believes in a
00:26:57multipolar world, and this belief has
00:27:01only gain. in strength and ground
00:27:04after
00:27:07the covid
00:27:09experience when when there was
00:27:13lot of extreme bias and and and
00:27:17supply chains broke down even
00:27:20multilateralism is now a
00:27:23discount so what you have instead are
00:27:27not grand global treaties but working
00:27:31arrangements with between some countries, so
00:27:35that is going to gain ground, and the more
00:27:38ground it gains, the stronger will
00:27:42be the global
00:27:46demand for a multilateral world and it will make it
00:30:23Russia's investigative committee unpacks the results of its
00:30:27probe into Kiev's attempted invasion the Kursk border region
00:30:31launched exactly. two years ago, also
00:30:34ahead on the program, thousands of migrants, including many children remain in
00:30:38suita following last week's mass influx into Spain. We
00:30:42examine the political fallout, as the EU demands, Morocco
00:30:46police, the very frontier, it
00:30:48contests and the devastating
00:30:51consequences unleashed by the atomic age is
00:30:55remembered as Harashima marks the day the US
00:30:58dropped the bomb.