The fall and fall of India Today

 

When the India Today magazine hit the stands first on December 15, 1975, it took India by storm. It was a child born during the infamous Emergency period when free speech was chained away. The magazine’s first cover story was, “The Emergency: Now You See it, Now You Don’t.” It told many things as they were and still managed to stay on the right side of the censors’ knives. This template defined it for decades to come – first-rate journalism, outstanding language, always speaking truth to power but without getting into an existential crisis. 

Slowly, it became a staple diet for all of us UPSC aspirants.

 

Almost from the beginning, India Today defined excellence in journalism. All media face problems from all governments. Where India Today stood out was, while it might use temperate language, it always spoke the truth. And, it never indulged in hyperbole. It never bootlicked. Hence it carried serious credibility. Later, it started India Today conclaves where it invited the highest and the mightiest and subjected them to sharp questions without being offensive.

 

It covered in graphic detail the Nellie massacre, an abject misstep of Indira Gandhi which led to thousands of Bengali Muslims massacred. This was when Indira Gandhi was at the peak of her powers. Following is an excerpt from India Today’s coverage:

 

“Today, Nellie is a graveyard, with all the attendant sights, smells and sounds of death: the ghastly hulks of gutted houses, the stench of rotting flesh, the sound of relatives mourning their mutilated dead. For the survivors huddling over their meagre meals in the camps, protected by armed guards from the madness that prowls the valley, the past is a blood-stained nightmare, the present a daze, the future only uncertainty. Perhaps the only one to be sure of what the future will bring is the vulture. It knows how to wait; it is a patient bird.”

 

The entire episode in which more than 3,000 people were killed, mostly women and children, over a seven-hour period was a direct result of Indira Gandhi’s arrogant misstep of holding elections against the express advice of the Police and others. However, this was just some distant problem for most of the people in the rest of India, the north-east being somewhere far away from them in their minds. It was India Today’s graphic coverage which made things real for them and shook the conscience of the nation. Indira Gandhi tried to confiscate copies of India Today from the newsstands but the magazine didn’t back down.

 

India Today’s sustained coverage of the Coalgate scam brought the CAG estimate of Rs. 1.86 lakh crore loss to the public domain, led to public uprising and the Supreme Court ultimately cancelling all the 214 coal block allocations. Other important coverages of India Today included The Bofors scandal (indicting the Rajiv Gandhi dispensation), the Babri Masjid demolition (directly criticising the institutional failures and the Narasimha Rao government) and so on.

 

Then there were the surveys (Mood Of The Nation polls, Educational Institutes and so on), Newsmakers of the Year and India Today Conclaves. Each one was considered the gold standard. Even the politicians disparaging some of these took secret and serious note.

 

For a very long period, India Today strode like a colossus in the print media universe. Even when I was abroad for a prolonged period, the high point of existence used to be the arrival of India Today, Its only serious challenge came from Outlook under Vinod Mehta when it was forced to become a weekly from a fortnightly in 1997.

 

Even after 2014, it held out for a while. I was amazed at its resilience. Then, at first slowly and then suddenly, things changed. From representing all that was best in Indian print journalism, it swung to the other extreme, that of an abject, slavish bootlicker.

 

In the run-up to the 2024 Parliamentary elections, India Today devoted nine cover stories to hailing Modi, one of them calling him a “reformer, builder, messiah of the poor” and “Vishwaguru.” Here are some samples of the covers:

The fawning language and paeans used by the magazine for its “Vishwaguru” nowadays are something else. For example, there was a change of government in West Bengal. It was nothing more nor less than one party winning and another party losing, the latter having won three times earlier in a row. The result itself has been under a cloud due to 27 lakh voters under adjudication and not able to vote and a statistically impossible 92.47 % voter turnout. It was a state election but India Today chose to go with a cover of Modi with a screeching headline “HISTORIC CONQUEST” as though it was some serious war between nations and an annexation of territory which it was anything but. 

From earlier covers of “Hero of hatred,” “Master divider” and “Riding the hate wave” to “The mover and the shaker,” “Modi holds firm” and “Historic conquest,” India Today has come a long way.

I used to read India Today and Outlook regularly. Both of them wilted under pressure. However, I stopped subscribing to Outlook much before that because, after Vinod Mehta, it had lost its zing. I have now stopped subscribing to India Today. The magazine was the last redoubt of India’s democracy. India Today’s fall mirrors India’s fall too.