The Hindu : 16 September 2021
Turn to the Page 4 of THE HINDU today 16 September, 2021. You won’t be able to miss the piece of news carrying the bold, emblazoned title: “A government order that heralded the social justice movement 100 years ago” and its sub-title that reads “The Communal GO proved to be a leveler, securing non-Brahmins the space due to them in administration”.
After reading the piece this morning I cannot help wondering if THE HINDU which, in the same 100 years since the Tamil Nadu GO was gazetted, has somehow not devolved if not regressed from a truly national newspaper into a local state propaganda organ for Dravidian political parties.
My feelings made me want to ask the Editor of the HINDU a few questions on her motivations behind publishing this piece of history and the timing of it. But I knew that if I dashed off to her a typical citizen-reader’s “Letter to the Editor”, it would never get published, and hence I decided to write this blogpost on my own website and share it with my own limited circle of readership/followers. So here we go:
Dear EDITOR,
Could you please respond to my following queries by explaining what reasons compelled you to dig up from the archives of the Government of Tamil Nadu a 100-year old Gazette regarding what you call “social levelling” of the “dominant Brahmin caste” of those yester-decades.
1. How necessary, newsworthy or relevant is this theme of this piece of Tamil Nadu legislative history today to the Tamil people after all these years?
2. Don’t we all know only too well that since 1950, when the Constitution of India got enshrined by the people of the Republic of India as their very own version of the Magna Carta, as it were, a system of social affirmation called Reservations for historically under-privileged castes in the country has already been conceived, structured, implemented and enforced relentlessly and vigorously across the length and breadth of this country?
3. Why make a big fuss about it all now?
4. Why continue frenetically beating victory drums for the stale occasion of battle that itself has long been already won and enough triumphal gloating about it too has already been seen, commemorated and feted a 100 times already in the last 100 years?
5. Let me take a shot at guessing what perhaps might be a few of your true reasons to dig up this irrelevant and musty piece of history from government archives: Perhaps you have no journalistic qualms at all in flaunting your indecent motive to propagandise, even weaponise it so that it can enable the means and realize the ends of insidious caste-identity politics practiced in Tamil Nadu today by the Dravidian masters whose principal English-language mouthpiece your newspaper has without doubt become today?
6. Tamilians all these years have been missing a wannabe-Lutyens Colony brand of Delhite-journalists amidst them right here in the city of Chennai and the HINDU today under your helms-woman-ship is trying to fulfil their wishes?
7. Was this piece of history dredged up by you as a way of singing paeans to the new powers that be in Tamil Nadu, the DMK and its forebear the Justice Party? Nothing wrong in political parties celebrating and commemorating the anniversaries of their long political journeys. But those festivities rightly belong only to inner and within inter-party forums … not in the public domain. One can understand a news article like this getting published in say “Murasoli“, or “Dinasari” the DMK-party newspapers… but to give this piece of crass party propaganda so much space in the HINDU?
8. Would I be wrong in guessing you did decide to carry this piece of arrant political propaganda because you wished to suck up to that hot-shot minister who holds today the purse-strings of the Government of Tamilnadu,?
9. Is it not the same minister then whose own father gets glorified in the piece as the great champion who “captured the aspirations of the non-Brahmins (of a 100 years ago!)” as expressed by him again in stirring words that you have been so keen to pick-up, quote and broadcast it for the grand occasion: “We are nothing but slaves in the hands of the Brahmin hierarchy. Let us educate ourselves, and in due course, we shall have our portion of government services and political power, proportionate to our strength and importance“. … Perhaps this minister with the noble intention of memorializing his father, ordered some IAS-minion of his to unearth this GO from the government archives and sent it across from his office in Fort St, George to you in your own office on Mount Road (where you are known to be Mahavishnu) with a small scribbled note attached saying “for favor of publication“? A command disguised as polite request?
10. Yes?! How could you then decline such a polite request from the HINDU’s master who has the power to both generously extend to you or hold back the largesse of the government’s press advertisements?
11. Or, perhaps, there is yet another motive of yours that led you to approve publishing this jejune, moth-eaten piece of Tamil legislative history? While you as de jure chief editor are beholden to your powerful masters, and their kith, in Government just so you can shore up your own newspaper’s commercial ad-revenues, I guess you must most humbly and equally be beholden too to to that master of yours within the HINDU — your kin and the Chairman Emeritus who, in fact, is de facto top editorial honcho? He, in fact, gets generously quoted in the piece published in the following glowing words: “The domination of Brahmins is summed up by N.Ram, former editor-in-chief of THE HINDU, in an article in the Economic and Political Weekly in 1979″!
12. Great, that is truly awesome! You have hit the proverbial two birds with a single stone, haven’t you? In just one shot of a journalistic coup de grace, you have indeed succeeded in pleasing two powerful mandarins, one in the corridors of political power in the present government and the other one who still continues to stalk and cast his dark and looming Murdochian shadow all along the corridors of the editorial offices in your building?
14. Dear Ma’am, the article also goes on to lavishly bestow column print-space to regurgitating very telling statistics of a 100 years ago on what percentage of civil servants, both higher and lower rung, lawyers, judges and educationists made up the dimensions of Brahmin dominance in public life. I grant you that those statistics indeed do make for very revealing information on the social temper of those times. But then you as Editor chose to stop there … you stopped at presenting merely a “snapshot” , a frozen moment of mummified history… Pray, can you tell me what empty purpose does that really serve for today’s readers?
15. If you had instead, dear Editor, also asked your editorial staffers to do a bit of serious journalistic research, and then provided too in the same article, some relevant comparative statistics as they pertain today to how the caste-wise distribution exists within the same category of jobs and positions held in the Tamil Nadu government, judiciary and education , then I would have congratulated you for genuine, un-biased and professional reporting in keeping with high yesteryear stands of the HINDU… not this blatant propaganda.
16. Do you know how many Brahmins today in Tamil Nadu are clerks, tahsildars, village munsiffs, district magistrates, high court judges, government department secretaries, public utility enterprises, government-run schools, colleges and universities? If you did have statistics on that reality, I’m sure you will find that in the past 100 years, your political masters have succeeded so spectacularly indeed in achieving their stated aspiration of systematically decimating and ending the Brahmin community to less than perhaps a tenth of its “dominating” presence a 100 years ago?
17. The Augean stables of Tamil Nadu government and those in the public and political space as well have all been ethically-cleansed of the hated Brahmins … and so, dear Editor, what purpose is served in publishing this piece when God is now already in his heaven and all’s well here upon earth!
So, dear Editor, I ask you again, why you think that a dog biting a man is still a great piece of news from history that is worth raking up and publishing? Haven’t you heard there is today a modern version of such old journalistic quips: that a man flogging a dead horse is not news … but then who knows, if the dead horse did suddenly come to life sometime, if at all, and began kicking the hell out of the man … now that indeed would be breaking news ?
Wait for that day … for it might yet come? For after all, what goes around in this world does usually come around… It is the law of karma speaking , it’s not the feeble voice of forlorn hope.
Sudarshan Madabushi