The Fareed Zakaria episode and the hypocrisy of American media

There is a pernicious irony in the whole Fareed Zakaria controversy. The messenger has been shot at (suspended, if you will) by the same media fraternity that is supposed to protect him. Worse, he has been shot down (so to say) for questioning a culture that considers shooting people a banal reality of human existence; a culture that displays an adamant refusal to encourage any debate on the practice, no matter what price it pays for it. Or others do.

In a piece Zakaria wrote for Time on gun control after the tragic Wisconsin Gurudwara massacre, he lifted a passage from Harvard University history professor Jill Lepore’s piece on the same issues published in The New Yorker. The plagiarism was caught. Zakaria apologized while his employers – Time and CNN (both, by the way, owned by Time Warner) – promptly suspended him from his duties as editor-at-large and host respectively “pending further review”. The future of one of the brightest intellectuals hangs in the balance.

I have no intention to defend Zakaria’s plagiarism here. But I feel sorry for him. I am also amazed and shocked at the oversight such a celebrated columnist committed by not attributing a small passage to a fellow intellectual. Considering the fact that Zakaria was taking on perhaps the most powerful lobby in the world on an issue that the US loves to be evasive about, I wish he had shown more diligence than he did.

Having said that, I also invite you – the proud third-world consumers of the largest media industry in the world – to have a closer look at the magnificent hypocrisy behind the American mainstream media’s self-righteousness and perceived integrity. Today, Time and CNN are considered the benchmarks of open, ‘objective’ and liberal journalism. They command awe, respect, not to mention a huge global market.        

Ideas and institutions gain respect and currency only when there is a force involved. And power does not want truth. It wants what it considers to be true as the truth so as to create conditions to perpetuate and reproduce that power. Truth, in other words, is the enemy of power. Now that’s an anomaly, because the media, by definition, is supposed to bring out the truth to its patrons. But truth does not get you money and market, proximity to power does. So what you get instead from the American mainstream media, patronized by the dominant powers-that-be, is not truth, but manufactured truths, propaganda, cover-ups, misinformation, concealment of information, and even blatant lies that gradually gain the force of truth simply because, as Hitler once said, they must be repeated ad nauseum.

In other words, the mainstream media in the US has consistently prided itself at being the handmaiden of the dominant powers – political, economic, military and cultural. They have acted as tools to indoctrinate, provoke, preach, misinform, and even numb the Americans towards what perhaps the best-known American intellectual Noam Chomsky calls ‘the manufacture of consent’. It is this consent that has helped the American empire invade, kill, loot and dominate as it wished with absolute impunity.

How else do we explain the blatant lies that the American media spread on the presence of what they call the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? What else explains the blacking out of any proper coverage of the massive Occupy movements across the US against what millions of Americans called crony capitalism? How else do we explain the complete erasure of any critical thought and ideas in the American mainstream media? Why is it that a ‘dangerous thinker’ like Arundhati Roy can be published in the Indian mainstream magazines and newspapers while it’s almost impossible to read anything from a Chomsky or a Howard Zinn or even a Jesse Jackson in the American press? How else do we explain the jokes about George W Bush’s famous IQ and Mitt Romney calling the Sikhs ‘Sheikhs’ while mourning the Wisconsin victims? How else can we explain the tragic ignorance of the Americans on the global affairs, a deliberate ignorance sustained by its media so as to keep them from knowing and thinking? How do we account for a complete consensus among the American minds – and its media – over the virtues of capitalism and consumerism? What else explains the American media’s obsession with sports, celebrities and pop culture? Where has the alternate space gone?        

It is when we try to answer these questions that we realize the hypocrisy behind what happened to Zakaria. It is at that moment that the ‘hallowed’ institutions of great journalism like the Time begin to look hollow and pedantic. Can’t it be easily alleged that the magazine and the news channel acted so promptly only because the issue that Zakaria had touched in his piece threatens the core of the American Inc.? Even after hundreds of shooting incidents all over the country in which hundreds of children, women and other innocents have been killed, it is naïve to talk about gun control in the US. A Michael Moore may cry hoarse after the tragic Columbine shooting or as we see now, one of the most powerful editors in the world may ask for a renewed debate on the issue. But the status quo is important and profitable, and must be sustained by the press. What is at stake is not only a multi-billion-dollar industry, but a culture of violence that helps the American empire make bombing children, millions of deaths and foreign wars a normative American reality which makes the Americans look ‘cool’.     

That explains why any rational voice that challenges the status quo is perceived as dangerous and must be muzzled. That explains why Americans were perhaps more horrified by their popular TV host lifting a paragraph from a historian’s essay and less at the absence of any political or social will to check the proliferation of deadly weapons in their schools, streets, churches, temples and even their bedrooms. To talk of ‘acknowledgment’ and ‘respect’ for other’s writings in a scenario where a crazed racist shoots down six people in cold blood at a small-town Gurudwara only appears as a cruel joke. While Fareed Zakaria is censured in the name of ‘ethics’ and ‘error of judgement’, there has been little talk of censuring a culture that believes in killing people.

As he is silenced the moment he raised that question, I wonder what questions must be coming to Zakaria’s mind now. I bet he is agonizing over what is worse – not attributing a piece of information to somebody who also agrees with your ideas, or being the lapdog – and not the watchdog – of the powers-that-be?
 
What do you think?

Can a 'closed' AMU be a model for Muslims?

If there is one obscure Latin word that the Aligarh Muslim University campus is quite familiar with, it’s ‘sine die’. I think it all started when former bureaucrat Mahmoodur Rahman, after assisting Governor Jagmohan in Kashmir where combing for militants meant forcibly vacating villages, started following the same logic at Aligarh. During the five-year tenure of Rahman (1995-2000), the university was closed at least thrice.

Since then, in my almost 18 years of association with the university, I have witnessed at least seven closures of the campus sine die. The incumbent Vice-Chancellor, P K Abdul Azis, has also closed the university thrice in his tenure. The regularity of its recourse at AMU has made the administration completely oblivious to the harm it does to the students. The unfortunate regularity of sine die closures has made them a rule at the AMU campus. There is an uncritical use of this most insane and insensitive act of closing the university when in fact the administration should have kept it open and resolved the crisis as early as possible. Sine die closure is basically a failure of the administration, and it’s about time they realise it.

The mainstream media too, comfortable with the narrative of two regional student groups firing at each other and thereby forcing the closure of the university, falls prey to certain essential images of a typical north Indian university where the students have easy access to weapons, where law and order remains a daily struggle and where academic pursuit is only incidental. And if it is a Muslim university, then the narrative gets aligned with a larger global narrative of certain essential images of Muslims. In the case of Aligarh Muslim University, its middle name becomes its own nemesis. “They must be like this only” is a common refrain. Well, why not? ‘They’ are like this everywhere in the world! Why should Muslims at Aligarh be any different?

In perpetuating the ‘violent’ stereotype of ‘those’ Muslims, the media failed to ask certain crucial questions behind the disturbance of the last few days. Let’s look at what actually happened in the last few days that forced the closure of the university. Two senior officials of the university – both related, and one holding the position with dubious credentials – try to get another official removed from the important office he has been holding; i.e. of examinations and admissions. Now it’s a known fact in Aligarh that admissions are one of the biggest ways of making quick money for senior officials. With almost 200 seats in medicine and more than 400 in engineering, not to mention hundreds others in intermediate in sciences, management, and other sought-after academic programmes, we can easily imagine the kind of money we are talking about here. Add to this mix a Vice-Chancellor, himself facing a plethora of corruption charges currently being probed by a two-member committee appointed by the HRD ministry, and you get a situation where the rot begins from the top. Justice A N Divecha and Justice B A Khan have already submitted their reports on March 21, 2011 to the HRD. They have indicted the high functionaries including the Finance Officer, the Registrar and the Vice Chancellor. The CAG report in November 2009 had already indicted them, having found huge financial irregularities. The government, reluctant to intervene in India’s largest minority institution, remains callous, and the V-C is having the last laugh.

The argument is simple. If the situation was really so critical, why didn’t the Vice-Chancellor cut his pleasure trip to Kerala short and take control of the situation? Why has the administration failed in checking certain rogue elements within it that threaten to subvert the functioning of the campus for their own interests? Why are students used as hired mercenaries by a few faculty members? Who will account for the students who only wanted to finish a few papers before joining their dream jobs? How can any sensible administration close the university when the exams are on? 

I am, however, more interested in asking a larger question that emerges out of a crisis like this at Aligarh. Recently, the government decided to open two more campuses of the AMU at Mallapuram in Kerala and at Murshidabad in West Bengal. The decision, in the context of the sorry picture the Sachar Committee report painted of the Muslim community in India, was welcomed by the Indian Muslims as an important step in the affirmative action programme of the UPA government. AMU saw it as another triumph of its national character and hailed the decision for being in line with the university’s historical role of being the intellectual and educational torchbearer of the beleaguered Muslim community. In its misplaced celebration of the decision, the university failed to ask a critically important and introspective question: can AMU really be a model for the community to be emulated at far-off centres like Mallapuram and Murshidabad?

It is a failure of the vision of community – and the university – when it laps up a decision like that. The Congress, in proudly displaying its affirmative programme for the Muslims by inaugurating branches of the university all over India, is only following the narrative of emotive issues of the Muslims which have nothing to do with the real development and upliftment of the community. Like Babari Masjid, Urdu, Waqf and Muslim Personal Law boards, AMU too is an issue which had played a largely emotive role in Muslim politics in India since the independence. In other words, both the government as well as the community feels a sense of fulfillment when AMU is given its due credence, however disputed it may be. Which is precisely why the government is more than happy in making AMU a model for the community, and not for example a more progressive and academically-oriented university like the JNU.

You will find numerous faculty and alumni who boast about AMU being a place where traditions and culture are prioritized over sound academics. It’s a misplaced feudal hangover which has outlived its logic. The realities of the 21st century India are far different from what a section of the Muslim elites in the 19th century had imagined when they founded the university at Aligarh. Myopic vision, inert culture, gender insensitivities and sterile academics hardly make a good model. By making a ‘closed’ AMU an example for Muslim education, the government as well as the community is only interested in sustaining a mediocre academic culture for the community. The university should first clean the rot within before it even dreams of emulation.

And, to begin with, let’s open the university as early as possible.

On the Ritual called AMU Hall Magazines

I hate Hall magazines in Aligarh! Well, most of them.

Surprised? Agitated? I won’t grudge it if you are.

In the spirit of democracy and my inalienable right to express myself, allow me to explain.

I have been following campus magazines in Aligarh ever since I joined as a wooly-eyed teenager in 1993. For various reasons. My love for writing was one, and a general interest in creative endeavours was always there. But a desire to explore the contours of the famous ‘Alig culture’ was the most important reason. And it still is.

Why would I look forward to the magazines every year?

I expected to be introduced to the history of the so-called Aligarh movement, its major protagonists, its limitations and of course, successes. I expected to be guided through the hallowed Aligarh Hall of Fame and be impressed by the distinguished line-up of its alumni. I hoped to read on Aligarh’s ‘contemporary history’ and gain some perspective on the place the university enjoyed in the larger universe of Muslim/minority politics and aspiration. I expected critical writings on the debates and issues within the Muslim/minority question – both national and global.

In fact, I would have been contented had they only contained good Urdu poetry!

In short, I expected interventions – intelligent, informed and insightful, as is natural to expect from a community that indulges in knowledge production and distribution.

But what would I rather get? Well, as I said, most of the times.

I will get the uncritical display of a ritual. The ritual of inviting contributions, of processing them and then putting them together, of publishing them through official funding, and finally, of archiving them – more as some sort of trophies than as dynamic pieces of writing intended to provoke discussions and debates.

It is this fixation with ritual that has been the hallmark of most of Aligarh’s activities. But I am going to limit myself to the Hall magazines and the frequent intellectual apathy they suffer from.

Let me explain the ritual. Open any of the more than a dozen Hall magazines published every year in Aligarh. You will inevitably find a picture of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan staring at you. The same portrait found everywhere on the campus, with an almost divine aura. Then you have the Vice-Chancellor’s portrait, followed by the Editor’s and then the Editorial team with the Provost of the Hall. 

I am yet to see a Hall magazine that dares to break this yawn-inducing and predictable pattern… or an editor who refuses to abide by the ritual.

Go to the contents now. Count the number of times you find Sir Syed there. Not that there is anything wrong in writing on Sir Syed. But it is precisely at such moments of tribute that the process of writing turns into a ritual. Fixation is contagious, and symptomatic of the inward-looking behaviour that Aligarh frequently demonstrates.

Look at the contents carefully. Essays on Sir Syed as a scientist, a journalist, or an architect! It’s amazing to see the different ways the Aligarh community has reinvented its founder, often stretching the eulogy to unreasonable and unfounded theories about his life and work.

In fact, I have a simple thumb rule for it. If the number of writings on Sir Syed exceeds those on other topics, close the magazine.

It is not only the Aligarh fixation with Sir Syed that is a problem here. The content is severely compromised because of a fixation with form. The magazines do not even pretend to engage intellectually. You often find engineering students blabbering on the latest on thermodynamics, or Unani medicine students on the benefits of neem leaves.

When writing becomes a ritual, banality creeps in. 

In Aligarh, it’s almost impossible to differentiate between two Hall magazines. That explains why most of them go unread. The ritual lies in collecting them (since you paid for them in your hall dues), but not in engaging with them.

So what is missing? My contention is simple. Hall magazines can – and should – be an exercise in critical intervention and thought. Rather than coming across as dull, boring pieces of literature, they should rather be dynamic enough to provoke discussions, encourage debates, probe the stereotypes, challenge the dominant, and question the present. They should be annual chronicles of political, social, educational and cultural churning that the university went through in the past year. They should live and breathe.

And of course, they should be an exercise in creativity. Not passivity. In short, they should be the barometers of what can be called the Aligarh life.

Anybody listening (or rather, reading)?

I hope somebody does.