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There is something increasingly disturbing about how the Indian media, with rare exceptions, has covered defence issues in recent years, with much of the reporting abandoning scrutiny in favour of cheerleading and celebrating the very institutions it is bound to hold to account.

In fact, so ecstatic is much of the print and electronic media at almost every announcement concerning defence acquisitions, indigenous materiel development, or claimed military achievements, that questioning their substance, deficiencies, or even feasibility has become almost an aberration.

More troublingly, over the past decade, questioning official claims or drawing attention to failures within the armed forces and the wider defence apparatus has too readily been branded anti-national, disloyal or even inimical to national security, amid the increasingly triumphalist national-security rhetoric of successive Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led governments.

Official claims in this regard are too often accepted at face value, projected capabilities treated as fact and routine announcements hailed as evidence of progress. The harder questions – what has actually been delivered, what remains deficient, what is dependent on foreign technology, what has been delayed and who is accountable, amongst others – are conspicuously left unasked.

In mature democracies – which India rightly prides itself on being – the fourth estate routinely performs a watchdog function alongside formal government oversight mechanisms, subjecting military claims, procurement failures, cost overruns, capability shortfalls and institutional lapses to sustained public scrutiny.

A serious defence press does not merely report what the military or government says; it interrogates it, tests it against evidence and pursues the consequences when promises are not fulfilled. It also does not simply wait for parliamentary committees or government audit bodies to identify failures; it independently follows the money, questions official claims and pursues shortcomings, long after official reports have been tabled in Parliament.

Adding to the erosion of such independent scrutiny is the disappearance of veteran journalists who understood military affairs, knew the system from the inside and were prepared to ask questions that senior officers and bureaucrats found distinctly uncomfortable. They have increasingly been replaced on the defence beat by wide-eyed newbies, many of whom appear more captivated by the military establishment than curious about it, and whose limited understanding of service matters is frequently exposed by the credulity and superlatives of their reporting.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

Some reporters and columnists who persisted in questioning official claims have consequently left these media outlets in frustration, after facing incessant queries and demands for explanations from within their own organisations and being made to justify legitimate scrutiny, as though they themselves had committed a professional transgression.

But the pressures on such independent reporting do not originate solely within news........

© The Wire