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Was it just a few days ago that we were all blithely caught up in the customary ceremony of wishing each other a happy new year? The year is hardly ten days old and it is already bent double under the weight of past transgressions, monstrous imperial ambitions and reminders of police cruelties. The forward movement of time, it seems, by no means indicates a progress towards a more enlightened, just and humane order; au contraire, we seem to be heading in the direction of an age of darkness and an unjust and bestial order. The flexing of military muscle in a region now designated as a stretch over which the ‘Donroe’ Doctrine shall prevail (with some help from variegated military aircraft and drones of the US military), came as a reminder that the neo-colonial beast is alive, roaring and fully capable of plucking a legitimate head of state and his wife from their bed chamber in Caracas and transporting them to face criminal proceedings in a New York court – within the course of a few hours.

What is conspicuous in the media coverage of these events is that while a large swathe of what can be described as the mainstream media in USA was happy to regurgitate the narratives of power, there was still some pushback in terms of argumentative questioning of US President Donald Trump from significant media actors. The appetite to engage in combative interlocution and verbal duals with the man is still very much in evidence. Here in India, such an appetite has long withered away. The opportunities to do so have also vanished. Forget press conferences, even the Diwali milans with the media of yore which yielded, if not a publishable quote, at least a selfie with the prime minister, have fallen into disuse. Consequently, India’s mainstream media have forgotten how to pose probing question to those in power, and those in power have forgotten how to be questioned. 

We had an eloquent and rare instance of this very recently when the NDTV correspondent, Anurag Dwary, confronted Madhya Pradesh’s Urban Development Minister Kailash Vijayvargiya on the contaminated drinking water that was being piped in to the residents of “city beautiful” Indore, leading to several diarrhoea deaths. The minister, besides himself in anger, lashed out at the journalist for his presumption in questioning him. Dwary was merely doing his job, but Vijayvargiya had forgotten what it is like to be answerable to the media.

It is under such a pall of amnesia, partly created by the speech and silences of the media, that institutions collapse and democracies die. A recent verdict delivered by the Supreme Court bore all the features of a judiciary willing, let’s say, to view justice through the prism of police enforcement. So delighted was the Delhi Police with the verdict that they termed it “fair”. They were satisfied precisely because the entire conspiratorial edifice that they had built on the Delhi violence case crucially hinged on framing Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid as the masterminds of the violence, despite every established fact going against the thesis.

Also read: Can We Fault Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid for Dreaming of a Better World?

Sharjeel was jailed far before the violence broke out, for some intemperate statements he had made during the anti-CAA protests. He has recently reiterated before an additional sessions judge in Delhi, what he had made clear time and again: Umar was not his mentor and in fact he had little to do with him during his five years as a student in ̌Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). As for Umar, he too was nowhere near Delhi when the violence broke out. If being an articulate public speaker with a strong sense of justice is a crime, then Umar is a criminal.

In the cherry picking of evidence, the Delhi Police took care to avoid bringing into the frame, the real masterminds who are now major figures in ruling party constellations. One is an MP and former minister of Information and Broadcasting as well as Youth Affairs; two others are........

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