An example of India Abroad's cover story then called Top of the Week. This one dated February 19, 1993, is about children's rights activists and crusader against child servitude Kailash Satyarthi's campaign. This was the first major coverage of it's kind given by any newspaper.
I note with note with no particular emotion the demise of the print version of the Indian American weekly newspaper India Abroad as announced by its current publisher Suresh Venkatachari. It was a news weekly I was an intimate journalistic member of close to 20 years and very significantly helped build it into a formidable voice for the Indian American community in America.
There was a time between 1985 when I began my association partially ended in 1999 that I either entirely reported and wrote or significantly reported and wrote nearly 50 percent of all its cover stories, then called ‘Top of the Week’. For a very long time India Abroad was a two-way operation, one as a highly regarded weekly newspaper headquartered in New York under the leadership of its feisty founder, the late Gopal Raju, and India Abroad News Service (IANS), the first ever Indian wire service reporting and distributing foreign news to newspapers and other publications in India, under its co-founder and chief editor Tarun Basu and I. I was their chief correspondent.
It was a tribute to Mr. Raju’s vision, persistence, ambition and even courage that India Abroad and IANS became what they did without any corporate big daddy bankrolling us. Fresh, original reporting was Mr. Raju’s insistence that happily converged with what Tarun and I independently believed in and insisted on. This was along with other fine journalists on the paper’s roster such as Aziz Haniffa, Rahul Bedi, Ela Dutt, Shantanu Guha Ray, T T Ram Mohan, Sanjay Suri, Andy McCord, the late Lynn Hudson, Apu Sikri, K S Nayar, I Gopalkrishna, Arul Louis, Anwar Iqbal along with Tarun Basu and I in the original team. A little later to join were equally talented names such M R Narayan Swamy, Vishnu Makhijani, Alex Chandy, Ashok Easwaran, Neelesh Misra, Rupa Chatterjee and many others. There are so many other names that I have left out. For a weekly of that size, Mr. Raju managed to employ an impressive number of people.
I told Mr. Raju many times that irrespective of what happens we were all very grateful to him and his remarkable commitment to independent journalism and also the fact that his vision supported so many families with very decent salaries. Speaking of which, I remember Tarun Basu and I were easily the two highest paid print journalists in the in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I don’t know about Tarun’s numbers but mine were touching about Rs. 200,000 a month then. That was unheard of in those days.
Much more important than the money though was the newspaper’s steadfast commitment to serious, substantive journalism. Despite the smallness of its size, the paper punched far above its weight and very successfully so. Since much of what we did was in the pre-hypergabbing (not a word but coined here) television anchor days, it was remarkable how much access Tarun and I had in New Delhi to the powers that be just as Aziz did in Washington or Rahul and Sanjay in London and all India Abroad journalists wherever they were. It was a measure of the respect that paper was held in and not because we did anyone any favor ever. To be a print journalist in New Delhi for an Indian American newspaper in the 1980s and 1990s and still manage to get anyone of consequence to talk to us was as much a reflection of the paper’s standing as it was of our, I mean us journalists’, reputation for fierce independence, unimpeachable credibility and fair-mindedness. Once again it is a tribute to Mr. Raju.
I still remember during one of my visits to Islamabad a top Indian diplomat telling me that every time he wants to understand the precise trajectory of US-India relations generally as well as in the context of Pakistan he would read India Abroad and specifically dispatches from Aziz Haniffa. The diplomat said we seemed to know more than anyone. This was true of almost all aspects of reporting. It was no accident that after the Babri Masjid was demolished the late former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee chose to talk only to Tarun and I. There was story after story and event after event that we got sought out for.
Neither Tarun nor I were surprised then when the much-venerated Economist ran a piece about ethnic Indian American and other similar publications in Britain and America in the 1990s and singled out India Abroad as a newsweekly of “unusually high quality.” Coming from a somewhat imperious if always eminently readable newspaper—yes, that’s what it calls itself—it was indeed high praise.
I personally owe a great deal to Mr. Raju and India Abroad in exposing me to a vast variety of assignments in my nearly 40 years in the profession. To be sent to Kashmir for close to seven years, several times in a year, since the 1989 insurgency exploded was remarkable for any newspaper but even more so for a small weekly newspaper in New York. As its original member Tarun, of course, got access anywhere in Delhi’s power structure entirely on the basis of our merit.
The late former Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh, for instance, used to call me every day at 9 a.m. for several days in the midst of and the aftermath of the now forgotten St. Kitts “scandal” in which he was falsely accused of parking some ill-gotten wealth on the Caribbean island. It turned out to be a political hit job as exposed by the late Lynn Hudson of India Abroad and IANS whom Mr. Raju sent to investigate to the island. Singh would tell me how grateful he was to the paper to which I would say, “We would just as easily nail you if Lynn found wrong-doing by you.” Singh would answer, “Of course, that is what I mean by your paper and news service being fair.”
I recall many such stories of how we always punched above our weight purely because of the stellar journalists we had. Andy McCord, for instance, was one of the few ones who went around Pakistan and Afghanistan reporting. Or Rahul Bedi and Sanjay Suri producing excellent stories out Europe.
Here is an IANS story dated April 26, 2012 that illustrates my point as I note the demise of India Abroad’s print version.
By Mayank Chhaya, IANS
Chicago: A callow prime minister, a global superstar, shadowy international arms dealers, crafty middlemen and nosy journalists were the dramatis personae of a real-life political thriller that played out in New Delhi, Stockholm, London and New York over a quarter century ago.
Of all the names crowding India’s biggest and most notorious arms purchase scandal at that time, the most incongruous ones were those of actor Amitabh Bachchan and his younger brother Ajitabh.
Through a series of complicated innuendos and stage whispers it was let known to obliging journalists that the Bachchans, particularly Ajitabh, were among the recipients of the Rs.640 million (about $53 million at the mid-1980s exchange rate of Rs. 12 to a dollar) Bofors gun bribery payoff. The actor himself, stung stiff by the sheer absurdity of the campaign against him and his brother, reacted with ferocious contempt and went to remarkable lengths to clear his and his family’s name.
On Jan 31, 1990, the Dagens Nyheter, a Swedish daily newspaper, reported that Swiss authorities had frozen an account belonging to Ajitabh Bachchan into which Bofors commissions were transferred from a coded account. That story was vigorously denied and challenged by the Bachchans, eventually compelling the paper to retract, apologize and settle saying they had been misled by Indian government sources.
With former police chief of Sweden, Sten Lindstrom, asserting in an interview with the media watchdog website The Hoot that the Bachchans’ names were “planted” by Indian investigators, a can of worms has been reopened on how the actor and his family were victimised in a vicious political game. Despite Lindstrom’s revelations, India is none the wiser about the real motivations behind dragging the actor’s name into it. At the time the most educated guess, which endures until today, was that prime minister Rajiv Gandhi was being attacked politically via the soft target of the Bachchans.
The Bachchans’ efforts to clear their name included a libel lawsuit against the former avatar of this wire service, India Abroad News Service, and its New York-based parent India Abroad Publications.
The suit by the Bachchans was filed and won in a British high court, enforcing its award on the New York-based India Abroad Publications and its owner, the late Gopal Raju. It became one of America’s most cited cases of the freedom of speech and the press under the First Amendment of the US constitution, widely written about and supported in the Supreme Court of New York by mainstream American media as amici curiae that included the New York Times, Associated Press, Time Warner, CBS, Association of American Publishers, Reader’s Digest, etc.
The cause of the libel suit against the publication and the wire service was the fact that the latter picked up and distributed the story originally appearing in the Dagens Nyheter, claiming that the Bachchans were the custodians of some of the bribe money. Although the Swedish newspaper settled the claim, India Abroad chose not to settle. It did report the Dagens Nyheter apology and settlement.
However, Raju, a gutsy Indian American publisher, decided to fight the case on the basic contention that publications and wire services do routinely pick up and transmit news stories in good faith and cannot, by the virtue of just that action, be held liable on the ground of malice.
While the British court granted the Bachchans a victory in the libel suit and awarded them 40,000 pounds in damages, Raju cited the newspaper company’s New York location to invoke the First Amendment protection against the enforcement of a British judgment on an America publication. A New York court ruled in favour of Raju and in the process set up a frequently cited legal precedent in America.
At the heart of the Bachchans versus India Abroad Publications case was the difference in the way libel is legally viewed and enforced in Britain, where the burden of proof is on those seen to be causing it, and America, where the burden of proof is on the party claiming to be aggrieved.
India Abroad’s victory in New York was not so much about the Bachchans’ inability to collect the damages as about the principle of the freedom of speech guaranteed under the First Amendment in America and how its interpretation varies fundamentally from Britain. It is regarded as a landmark judgment.
There was a perception in America’s legal community at the time of the lawsuit being an instance of “libel tourism” where those with means file libel lawsuits in countries where the libel laws are weighed against the media. Equally, there were those who thought that the Bachchans were justified in making an example of India Abroad and the wire service, IANS.
This writer, who interviewed Bachchan in the aftermath of the controversy, was witness to his profound chagrin at having been dragged into the sordid affair simply because he and Rajiv Gandhi were childhood friends and their families had longstanding ties. While the Bachchans have emerged unscathed, albeit after such a long time, for Gandhi’s family Lindstrom’s comments are equivocal. “There was no evidence that he (Gandhi) had received any bribe. But he watched the massive cover-up in India and Sweden and did nothing,” he has been quoted as saying.
Of course, Lindstrom’s disclosures are not seen as particularly remarkable because a lot of what he says has been claimed in some form or the other over the years, including that Gandhi himself did not benefit. For the Bachchans, its importance comes from the fact that for the first time there is an authoritative face other than their own behind the assertion of their innocence. It may have been too long in coming but it does offer them a much-deserved closure.
