Caste, Racism and the Common Threads

Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste (The Lies That Divide Us) has been on my reading list for long. Though I bought it a couple of months ago, only recently I decided to take the plunge into this voluminous book. It delves deep into the race problem in the United States and draws parallels with the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany and the long-standing caste system in India. 

Wilkerson, a New York Times veteran turned academic, feels the term racism is insufficient to encapsulate the systemic oppression of African American people in the US and prefers to use the term ‘caste’, which in Indian society is used to describe a person’s social standing in the well-demarcated hierarchy. 

The term Caste originated from the Portuguese word Casta, meaning race or breed, and it was coined by Portuguese traders. While doing business with their Indian counterparts, these traders observed some well demarcated divisions within Indian society.

Caste has been present in the Indian subcontinent for over a millennium, while the first batch of slaves from Africa came to America around 400 years ago.

The first time I heard the term slavery was when I had to study a small portion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in school. The chapter described some of the sub-human living conditions of slaves in the US in the 18th century. 

Ever since I have been hearing intermittently about the friction between the African Americans and the whites in the US. They become a talking point when there is a Rodney King or George Floyd-type incident of police high-handedness towards African American youths, resulting in widespread protests. Even the term ‘African American’ is a refined and politically correct avatar of Negro or black that was freely used in the 1970s and 80s. 

Caste in India

In India, your status in society gets decided by the accident of birth with Brahmins figuring at the top of the pecking order, followed by Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras, and a vast underclass - collectively called Dalits or Bahujans or outcastes. The widespread practice of marrying only within one’s own caste has kept this water-tight segregation alive for centuries. 

This hierarchical order, also known as Brahminical order, is well entrenched with each caste showing deference to those above them and riding roughshod over the less fortunate. The father of the Indian constitution and a Dalit himself, B R Ambedkar, had succinctly termed it as ‘graded inequality’.

Even religions like Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism that profess to be opposed to casteism tend to acknowledge this Brahminical order as a fait accompli of Indian society. In fact, some sects like Syrian Christians in Kerala take pride in their professed Brahmin ancestry before they embraced Christianity.

Racism in the US

In the US, when the founding fathers drafted the Constitution, the welfare of the blacks was not there in their minds. Slavery was considered an accepted practice and a vital element in keeping the US farm sector running on near-zero wage bills.

Even the White House had a slave quarter. The third president Thomas Jefferson, who had authored the epoch-making Declaration of Independence, had fathered six children from one of his slaves.

Though Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery in 1865, after a four-year-long civil war, the subsequent rulers did precious little to help the newly freed slaves join the mainstream.

On the contrary, the southern states that had fought against the abolition of slavery during the Civil War introduced the Jim Crow laws (Jim Crow being a pejorative term for an African American). These laws supported racial segregation in public places and proposed a host of other discriminatory measures aimed at keeping the African American community on the fringes of society. 

‘Negroes and dogs not allowed’ boards were proudly flaunted in front of shops and restaurants. Even where they were allowed, blacks were served only after all the white customers had been attended to. Public buildings and movie halls in some towns had separate entrances for blacks and whites, and hospitals had separate wards for black patients. In the armed forces, they had separate barracks for white and black soldiers.

It is said that when World War II was drawing to a close, a school in Columbus, Ohio, held an essay contest with the topic “What to do with Hitler after the war.” An African American girl wrote just one sentence: “Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of life in America.” The Jim Crow laws remained for around a hundred years in the southern states and were repealed during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. 

Pat from the Nazis

While studying ways and means to prosecute the Jewish community and other minorities, the Nazis were quite impressed by the way the United States had sustained its white supremacy by treating African Americans and other minorities as second-class citizens. 

They were particularly impressed by American eugenicist Madison Grant who firmly believed in Aryan supremacy and was considered close to US Presidents Herbert Hoover and Theodore Roosevelt. Grant had persuaded the US administration in the 1920s to tighten laws related to immigration and interracial marriages. He believed that ‘inferior stocks’ should be sterilized and quarantined in order to get them eliminated. His book ‘The Passage of a Great Race’ advocated ‘cleansing’ the gene pool and had a special place in Adolf Hitler’s library.

The common thread among the ruling class and elites of the US, India, and Germany was the zeal to maintain the purity of the bloodline. In the three countries, there were legal and societal curbs on interracial marriages. 

Another commonality was the ‘sanctity’ in the usage of water. In the US, offices had separate water fountains for white and black employees, and many beaches were out of bounds for African Americans. In India, the Dalits and other lower castes too faced similar restrictions and the Nazi Germany also barred Jews from using many beaches. 

Race Purity

Among the whites, anyone not having Anglo-Saxon blood was considered ‘polluted’. People from other European countries such as Ireland, Italy, Spain, Germany, Russia, and others fell into this category. In fact, Benjamin Franklin, another luminary of the American War of Independence, was concerned about the rising influx of German immigrants to Pennsylvania State and feared that they may ‘Germanize’ the state by imposing their language and culture. 

However despite all these intra-continental prejudices, the European immigrants always enjoyed a privileged status in the US as regardless of their country of origin or vocation, they were slotted in the ‘white’ category once they entered America. Whereas people migrating from Asia, Africa or South America were classified as ‘coloured’ or ‘blacks’. And however successful they are in their careers or businesses they are seen through the lens of their race.

By the 1880s the US policymakers started getting worried that the increased immigration might upset the white supremacy and began imposing curbs, especially those from the non-European countries. The axe first fell on the Chinese in 1882 and this tightening of curbs continued until the 1960s.

Trump Legacy

Donald Trump came to power by tapping the insecurities of white voters. He capitalized on their fears that whites would turn into a minority sometime in the 2040s. His presidency polarized the US society and opened the old wounds of the Civil War era. 

The neo-Confederates, who drew inspiration from the Confederacy movement that fought against the abolition of slavery, started gaining prominence in some of the southern states. Though the Confederacy movement was defeated and slavery was abolished, they remained a force in southern states and subsequent governments did little to keep them in check. The neo-Confederates saw the advent of Trump in the White House as an act of reclaiming their 'glorious past' and this further strained the tenuous racial equation in many cities, leading to violent clashes.

Personal Anecdotes

Wilkerson recounts a few personal anecdotes to highlight the subtle racism in the present-day US. As she lives in a predominantly white neighbourhood, salesmen coming to her house assume she is the housemaid and ask her to call the ‘madam’! She also recalls an unsavoury incident at a restaurant along with her white host. 

She also narrates an interesting nugget regarding Ambedkar. She happened to attend a seminar on casteism organized by a US-based Indian group. The organizers presented her with a small bronze bust of Ambedkar.

When she was in the airport undergoing a security check, the African American security officer spotted it and grew suspicious. He got it closely checked and asked, “Who is this?” Wilkerson thought telling him about Ambedkar would be a laborious process. So she told him: “This is Martin Luther King of India.” 

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes

Oppenheimer Omnibus

There is now a ‘mushroom cloud’ of opinions about Christopher Nolan’s latest movie Oppenheimer. While the overall opinions are positive, some do pick Nolan for certain historical omissions. The most glaring miss was his soft pedalling of the devastation Japan faced after the dropping of nuclear bombs, and the US administration’s heavy-handedness in evicting the Hispanic residents at the nuclear bomb test site at Los Alamos.

Before the promos were out, I had vaguely heard of Robert J Oppenheimer as the nuclear scientist who led Project Manhattan – the United States' plan to build a nuclear bomb during the Second World War. In India, he was also remembered for quoting a line from Bhagavad Gita, “Now I become death, the destroyer of worlds,” after the bomb was successfully tested.

Thanks to a friend’s prodding, I landed at a city multiplex on the first day of the movie’s screening. The hall was packed and we managed to get tickets only in one of the front rows - third from the screen. The hall was milling with young college-going and 20-something crowd, probably Nolan fans mesmerized by his Dark Knight and Inception. 

It made me wonder how they are going to take their favourite director’s attempt at a three-hour-long biopic about a scientist - which totally eliminates any scope for high-voltage action or special effects. Moreover, I wondered how many of these students and young professionals, with their brains hardwired to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), will feel excited about a period drama steeped in politics and history. 

I had come for the movie with a near-clean slate. I didn’t closely read any newspaper reviews. The news item of lead actor Cillian Murphy’s interest in Bhagavad Gita had evoked some social media buzz, especially among the bhakt crowd. 

But their euphoria of an Indian scripture being validated by a Hollywood star soon turned into anger after the movie was released. To their chagrin, the famous scientist is shown reading the holy book during a sex scene. This is now snowballing into a major controversy with the latest reports of Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur wading into it. He has censured the censor board for letting this objectionable scene past their scissors. 

There are even calls that Nolan should drop this scene worldwide. This controversy is likely to linger on for some time as the hyper-nationalist Indian diaspora is expected to keep it on the boil. I recall how Time magazine columnist Joel Stein was forced to apologise in 2010 after he wrote a humour piece on how the town of Edison in New Jersey state changed after being swamped by Indian immigrants. 

As I said earlier, my knowledge of Oppenheimer was sketchy. So I had no idea that this ‘father of the nuclear bomb’ too was caught up in the maelstrom of McCarthy's witch hunt for communists and socialists in the 1950s. So far, I had thought that only politicians, film artistes and writers were hauled up. One of the most notable ones was Charlie Chaplin.

During the early days of the cold war, the US policymakers thought that socialism was more dangerous than fascism. They made all-out efforts to weed out or blacklist people they thought were sympathetic to these causes from the federal administration, universities, and the film industry.

Unlike the stereotype of ‘apolitical’ scientists steeped in lab research, Oppenheimer was active politically, though in a prudent manner - he baulked from becoming a card-carrying Communist. But he made contributions to socialists and Communists fighting General Franco during the Spanish civil war, wanted scientists and academics to form unions, and was in love with a card-carrying Communist woman academic. 

All this did not affect him when he got down to setting up a nuclear testing facility in a remote desert land in Los Alamos and wooing top scientists in the country to work on the project. Once the weapon got successfully tested he became a national hero. 

But his ties with the Communists came back to bite after the world came to be divided into two camps – the US-led Western bloc (comprising capitalist countries) and the then USSR-led Eastern bloc (communist countries) after World War II. His opposition to the hydrogen bomb and fear of an arms race also landed him in the bad books of the US administration. 

As for characterization, Murphy with his probing eyes gets into the skin of Oppenheimer, who graduates from being a precocious science student fiddling at a lab in Cambridge, to a more confident theoretical physicist. During Project Manhattan, he acquires the swagger of a confident entrepreneur trying to sell the idea of the atomic bomb to fellow scientists. After the devastation caused by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the unravelling begins. He is shattered and vulnerable for the rest of his life.

I just could not make out Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr. Nolan showed them in an entirely different light. Damon has traded his boyish looks to be a Lieutenant General who was the military face of Project Manhattan. Downey Jr, famous for his Iron Man roles, plays a more complex role as a government official who tries to pin down Oppenheimer with his previous links with socialism and communism after World War II when McCarthyism took over.

It is to the credit of Nolan that he keeps viewers engaged for three long hours. It is no mean feat to keep the Instagram Reels generation, with low attention spans, engaged for such a long time. 

Tailpiece: Almost throughout the movie Oppenheimer has a cigarette dangling on his lips, or someone else is smoking. Hence we had the ‘smoking kills’ sign as a permanent fixture on the right corner of the screen. Sounded a bit rich as the movie itself is about the atomic bomb and killing people in thousands!

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes

Close Shave with Bank Hackers

Terms like phishing, and hacking have been swirling around in TV channel discussions and in newspapers, with cyber experts listing out the precautionary steps to be taken. Banks also bombard us with text messages, often to the point of clogging our phone storage space, urging us to never share the one-time password (OTP) with anyone, and no bank official would ever ask for it.

But cybercriminals continue to thrive and find newer methods to fool bank customers, and every second day there are reports of people losing their hard-earned savings to phishing attacks. The other day a hacker came dangerously close to wiping out my bank balance.

I was trying to make an online payment for the monthly apartment maintenance fee. But for some inexplicable reason, I was not getting the OTP on my registered mobile number and hence could not clear the final step of the money transfer. After a couple of attempts, I gave up and decided to pay some other day.

However, later on, I decided to tweet about it, wondering whether mine was an isolated case or any glitch in the bank’s bulk mail mechanism. Minutes later I noticed that there was a reply from a Twitter handle displaying the bank logo and apologizing for the inconvenience caused, along with a helpline number.  

A couple of hours later I thought of giving the number a try. The number looked a bit odd as most banks have a 12-digit helpline number starting with 1800… while this was a straight 10-digit mobile number. But I let it pass.

When I rang up the number, the usual paraphernalia associated with banks’ helpline numbers was missing - no answering machines welcoming me and directing me to press this or that number. Instead, there was a guy at the other end and he was conversant only in Hindi. 

I told him about the issue and after a brief pause, he said that for identification purposes I need to tell my permanent account number (PAN), issued by the Income Tax Department. In hindsight, I realized this was the first stage of the trap and I fell for it. Soon after I shared my PAN number, I heard a message beep on my phone.

He asked if I got a message. When I checked my phone’s message folder, I found a fresh one had landed on the bank’s message thread. He then told me to share the OTP mentioned in the message. 

The moment he said that I smelled a rat. I was reminded of the numerous warning messages banks had sent against sharing OTP. I immediately disconnected the call. This was followed by a flurry of incoming calls, and my phone’s Truecaller app traced them to disparate locations such as Lucknow, Patna, and Kolkata. I refused to take any of these calls.

I then took a closer look at their Twitter handle. I noticed that it was riddled with typos and grammatical errors and did not have a blue tick. Even in the title ‘cares’ was spelled as ‘caress’. After the calls stopped, I got a text message, ‘sar coll me’ [sic]. 

I immediately left for the bank and told the executive about not receiving OTP. I also narrated to him about this shady helpline and my refusal to comply with their dubious demand. The executive remarked, "Sir you have been saved."

He explained that they were actually hackers and had I given the OTP I would have lost all the money in the account. He claimed the bank keeps receiving such complaints and recently even one of their employees got conned in a similar fashion!

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes

Afwaah: Rumours in New India

After getting eclipsed by the propaganda movie Kerala Story in theatres, Sudhir Mishra’s Afwaah is now making its OTT debut and will be screened on Netflix from June 30. Interestingly, despite being a top draw and hogging most shows at multiplexes, Kerala Story is now struggling to find an OTT release.

Set in a town in Rajasthan, Afwaah captures the burning issues of ‘new India’ such as communalism, misuse of social media to circulate and amplify fake news, beef politics, and the toll it takes on different strata of society. All of this is narrated by Mishra in his trademark riveting fashion, reminiscent of his suspense thriller Is Raat Ki Subah Nahin. 

The opening scene sets the tone. A political rally passes through a communally sensitive area and a local politician (Sumeet Vyas) makes inflammatory speeches. This leads to communal violence, resulting in the killing of a meat seller by the politician’s henchman (Sharib Hashmi). 

Mishra then weaves in many strands – the politician’s fiancé (Bhumi Pednekar), who is also the daughter of a veteran politician, is upset with the goings on and decides to cut asunder ties with family. 

Her path crosses with a US-returned Indian Muslim advertising professional and TedX speaker (Nawazuddin Siddiqui). She tags on to him to escape from her family members and professed well-wishers. Meanwhile, after the riots, Hashmi is told by his boss to lie low. But he soon discovers that there is a danger to his life and decides to flee.

Both Siddiqui and Pednekar keep the high-voltage drama going and they are joined by Hashmi who too is on the run. Amid all this Mishra brings in love jihad, beef politics, and the rise in communal temperature. It climaxes with the dance drama of a high-brow literature festival coming face-to-face with the anarchy outside the fortified venue. 

The movie’s theatre release coincided with that of Kerala Story, a film about some girls from Kerala joining ISIS. The film was economical on facts and high on propaganda. 

But it had the blessing of the ruling establishment at the Centre. In fact, during his whistle-stop election tour in Karnataka, the prime minister had praised the film and taking cue many BJP-ruled states made Kerala Story tax-free. Many ministers made a beeline to theatres, with cameras in tow, to watch the film.

All this hype paid rich dividends for the movie’s producers at the box office. On the other hand, Afwaah had a modest opening in most cities. It opened to just single shows in some theatres (with many having screenings after 9 pm). Such a limited opening was a disaster foretold, as people were reluctant to go to theatres located far away and at odd times.

Hope the OTT release will provide the movie a new lease of life. 

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes

Gitanjali Aiyar: An Icon of Bygone Era

 

In this era of screaming TV anchors and high-decibel debates that resemble a bout in a wrestling ring, the passing away of Gitanjali Aiyar reminded us of far more dignified, though somewhat staid, times of television news in India. Those were the early days of television news in the country and unlike a newspaper reporter or a radio newsreader, a TV newsreader has a face, and viewers were getting used to this novelty of seeing them regularly in their living rooms.

Gitanjali Aiyar, along with Neethi Raveendran, Minu, Komal G.B. Singh, Rini Simon, Preet K.S. Bedi, Suneet Tandon, Tejeshwar Singh and others became household names in the 1980s, when Rajiv Gandhi government went on an overdrive to spread the footprint of the country's lone television network Doordarshan across the country. TV towers were getting inaugurated on a daily basis in every other district, and it was seen as part of Rajiv Gandhi’s vision to take India to the 21st century.

For the viewers, this sudden burst of visual treat was very alluring. So far he/she had to go to the nearest cinema hall for visual entertainment. Moreover, the TV offered much more: global sporting events like Olympics, Asian Games and live telecasts of cricket matches, all of which could be enjoyed from the comfort of your homes. It was also a great boon for the invalid and the aged who could not go to cinema halls.

Though the government succeeded in making the television hardware ubiquitous across the country, the programming part remained very Delhi-centric, and heavily skewed in favour of the Hindi language. Since the state-owned Doordarshan enjoyed a monopoly over the airwaves, viewers were actually a captive audience with no other alternative. Satellite television and dish antennas were yet to make an entry.

Amid all these limited offerings, there was a 20-minute English news bulletin at 9 pm, which many of those residing in the non-Hindi belt looked forward to. Those were pre-teleprompter days and news readers had the unenviable task of reading through the paper and maintaining occasional eye contact with the viewers.

With her crystal clear accent, lean build, and immaculate sartorial sense, Gitanjali Aiyar soon endeared her viewers. Women used to gawk at the saree she used to wear and compare them with that of fellow women newsreaders.

However, many people did not know that Gitanjali Aiyar was actually a Maharashtrian and her maiden name was Gitanjali Ambegaonkar. Hence, she sometimes used to trip while pronouncing some tongue-twister names of South Indian cities and their people. This used to roil those residing in the south of Vindhyas – how could an Aiyar pronounce Kozhikode or Thenmozhi wrongly? Some even used to shoot off angry letters to the editor in English dailies.

Being a government-run institution, Doordarshan news was a bland fare as it had to go by the sarkari rule book. What passed off as a news bulletin was actually a caravan of speeches, book releases, and planting of trees (all mainly in Delhi) by telegenic Rajiv Gandhi. Things like 'breaking news' or 'flash' were unheard of and there was a yawning gap between what we saw on television and what we read in newspapers and magazines. The latter appeared to be closer to capturing the rough and tumble of Indian politics.

Towards the latter part of Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure, the country was rocked by Bofors, Shah Banu case, Ram Janambhoomi, and other controversies, but Doordarshan managed to remain hermetically sealed from all the heat and dust it generated.

The entry of satellite television in the late 1980s began stirring things up. It provided a glimpse of what BBC or CNN television news looked like. The launch of homegrown news channels like Star TV News and vernacular offerings in the mid-nineties raised the bar. Soon Doordarshan news had fewer takers and it got relegated to an also-ran status amid a gaggle of newly-started TV channels.

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes

Hammer Over Heritage

 

I recently came across this picture on Twitter of Mumbai’s Eros movie theatre covered with tarpaulins as it gets ready to be torn down to make way for yet another ritzy shopping mall. Built in 1938, Eros is one of the prime example of art deco style of architecture in the city, which was very popular in the 1920s and 30s across the world.

Art Deco combined modern styles with fine craftsmanship and rich materials, while symmetry was its hallmark. However, its dominance ended with the beginning of World War II and the rise of the strictly functional styles of modern architecture.

South Mumbai became a Mecca of art deco in the 1930s with apartments on the newly reclaimed Marine Drive built in this fashion. The trend later spread to suburbs such as Matunga and Chembur. In fact, even today Mumbai houses the second highest number of art deco buildings in the world after Miami.

Coming back to Eros, during my stay in Bombay (as it was known back then in the early 1990s), it was a landmark theatre located right opposite to the Churchgate station. It was dull yellow structure with a light maroon façade and had two art deco blocks joining in the middle to cylindrical structure.

Eros along with Regal and Sterling used to screen only English movies, and I remember that Steve Martin starrer Father of the Bride was the first movie I saw at Eros, and the first in Mumbai. The movie was a hit and the producers tried to milk it further with sequels.

After that these three movie theatres – Eros, Regal and Sterling became permanent fixtures during off days and holidays.

Those were pre-internet days and movie watching was an altogether different experience. Online booking was not even thought of, and hence, one had to reach the theatre a couple of hours in advance to avoid facing a ‘house full’ board at the ticket counter. Making an advance booking meant going to the theatre in the morning to book for a night show. 

After the culture of people going to malls and watching movies in multiplexes became well entrenched, the single-screen legacy theatres came under threat. Sterling reinvented itself into a multiplex, Regal diluted its Hollywood only norm and Eros stopped screening movies in 2016.

Now this piece of priceless heritage is soon going to be history.

Dumb and Dumber

 

While reading late journalist/editor Vinod Mehta’s memoir Editor Unplugged, published in 2014 and a sequel to his earlier memoir Lucknow Boy,  one is astonished to see the cockiness of TV news channels in the pre-Modi days. Mehta, whose entire four-decade-old career spanned through the print medium starting from the ancient linotype era, had a love-hate relationship with the TV news channels. 

He used to be a reluctant guest at some of the panel discussions on TV, but savoured the ‘face recognition’ it offered among the general public. He, however, claims that he will never trade his position as a print publication editor for that of a TV anchor.

Mehta chides Indian TV news anchors for lacking nuance while dealing with the complexities of politics, unlike their British and American counterparts, but grudgingly acknowledges that TV new channels have changed the citizen-politician relationship and made the latter more accessible to the aam aadmi. He also lauds TV channels for throwing light on the day-to-day hassles and cruelty experienced by the unempowered class.

A case in point was the brutal gangrape of a Delhi woman in 2012, now known as the Nirbhaya case. The saturation coverage by TV news channels ensured that the issue never got relegated to a statistic and the perpetrators got punished. The victim’s family hailed from a lower middle-class background. Various TV news channels, especially the vernacular ones, have also highlighted the woes faced by the urban poor in metro cities and the pathetic conditions of slums.

TV news reporters back then were very aggressive and never hesitated from shoving the mic in front of those in power and posing tough questions. During the 26/11 terror attack in Mumbai and the numerous corruption allegations that the then UPA government faced, the TV journalists raised pertinent questions that had put the Manmohan Singh government on the mat and it had to pay a heavy price during the 2014 general elections.

But after the Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance government came to power in 2014, the mindset of TV news reporters and media houses has undergone a sea change. There has been a total meltdown of the combativeness among the TV anchors with most of them toeing the government line. 

They can be now broadly classified into two categories – lap dogs and guard dogs. The former see no wrong in the government and sing praises day in and day out, and totally blank out any criticism or dissent. They willingly and unabashedly work as the propaganda arm of the government.

The second types also carry out the above functions, but in addition, they strain every nerve to discredit and nip in the bud whatever little dissent is left in the country. Former NDTV India anchor Ravish Kumar, one of those honourable exceptions who chose not to join the lap-dog-guard-dog herd, had coined the term Godi Media (media sitting in the lap of establishment) and it soon gained wide credence.

The conduct of mainstream leading television stations during the recent farmers’ agitation and earlier unrests will surely make Mehta turn in his grave. They were busy looking for a sliver of opportunity to discredit the protestors, look for a foreign conspiracy angle, and dub the protesters as anti-national. They never dared shove the mic in front of any ruling party neta to ask some hard questions.

This slavish docility is not confined to TV news channels. Many newspaper columnists have become circumspect and resort to wishy-washy stands on various issues. The same guys had no fear of taking on the Prime Minister and the government during Manmohan Singh’s tenure and before. 

Self-censorship is now a byword for most publications and it is there at all levels - right from the reporter to editor to proprietor. Hence spinning the narrative in the favour of the ruling party is the new credo. Otherwise, government ads stop coming or, even worse, they enter the bad books of state-run investigative agencies. 

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes