Why This Review

Right from Pokharan II, its authors have presumed and repeatedly proclaimed a consensus. A national consensus in favour of the nuclear blasts and the nuclear-weaponisation policy and programme represented by them. The claim has been sought to be reinforced by claims of sectional consensus, a series of them. The tests have, thus, been projected as a proud achievement of patriotic scientists. As an answer to the aspirations of the intelligentsia. As the unavoidable and ultimate solution to our security problems. As just what the doctor ordered for a demoralised country and its depressed spirit. As the recipe for the economic resurgence that made the recession-hit industry’s mouth water. Even as what "ranking" school students of an educationally advanced city, to go by a recent report of yet another Gallup poll on the subject, give the government full marks for.

The presumption could not have spared professional journalists as a category. It has not.

The majority opinion of the media, to go by empirical observations, may well have been one welcome to the Pokharan-proud establishment. Was it right, however, to regard it as the opinion of the working journalists as a whole? To dismiss the voices of difference, and more express dissent, as merely minor deviations that deserved to be ignored? This, unfortunately but very understandably, has been the attempt of official ‘consensus’-creators as well as their assorted abettors.

One of the purposes of the founding of a forum under the name of Journalists Against Nuclear Weapons was to question the presumption. In other words, to announce and assert the existence among practising journalists of an opinion opposed to the new, heightened threat of nuclear weaponisation, not only in India but in its neighbourhood as well. And, to articulate this opposition to Pokharan as well as Chagai in a manner that would be at once meaningful and militant. (See back cover.)

It is the same purpose that this booklet (which includes two reviews of national newspapers, two of Tamil newspapers and periodicals, and one of Malayalam newspapers) is intended to serve. The purpose cannot, perhaps, be served better than by a section of journalists subjecting the post-Pokharan performance of the media to a serious scrutiny from an acknowledgedly anti-nuclear-weapon standpoint. The exercise would indeed appear to be the very first that working journalists embarking on a campaign of this kind must engage in.

The idea was there at the back of the minds of those who came together to found this forum. What helped crystallise it, however, was a highly morale-boosting communication we received from a fellow-journalist in Pakistan, soon after the JANW was born. (See Appendix A.) Zaffarullah Khan did not stop with noticing the event and the new organisation. He confirmed our faith in a common subcontinental cause with a critique in some detail of the Pakistani media’s response, as distinguished from that of professional mediapersons like him, to the challenge that was Chagai. We resolved to undertake a similar review of the Indian media’s post-Pokharan role.

The result, before you, is barely the beginning of a review. We hope to carry the process forward, into more of the print media and then beyond. Already clear, however, is a fact that makes it an exercise of extra-academic import. The media reactions under study reveal a much-more-than-reactive media role on the basic issue of the Indian Bomb. To recount these responses is to recognise the several dimensions of a large, indeed a life-and-death issue of public interest. One from which it will be absurd to try and separate avowed, and too often secrecy-shrouded, security interests.

J. Sri Raman

Convenor

Journalists Against Nuclear Weapons