Rs. 1500 Crore “Maoist Empire” or How the Police plants stories in the Press

PARTHO SARATHI RAY
Sanhati.com

“Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.” - Joseph Goebbels

Propaganda is one of the main weapons of the government of India’s Operation Green Hunt. The propaganda war is being waged in order to mould public opinion and turn liberal voices against the enemy, the Maoists. As part of this propaganda campaign, the government has brought out large, full colour advertisements (paid for by taxpayers’ money) in major newspapers which have portrayed the Maoists as “ruthless killers” and as destroyers of public property.

However a more insidious, and clandestine, part of the propaganda war, is to plant stories in the mainstream media in the form of “news”, which the average reader, having faith in the objectivity of the media as the main source of information, will take at face value as the truth. It is quite difficult to identify a news item as a police plant (we might just be able to guess), but a news story which appeared recently in the press, and was widely circulated, is a good illustration of what might be a story planted by intelligence agencies, with the connivance of the press.

It is a news story about the “Maoist empire”, the ways and means by which the Maoists apparently function like a corporation to raise a huge amount of money by “extortion, drugs, looting, ransom and robbery” to the tune of Rs 1500 crore. The main, and most widely circulated story appeared in the Sunday Times of India of 11th April, 2010, as a Special Report titled “The Maoist empire Rs 1500 crore and counting” datelined Bhubaneshwar/Ranchi/Kolkata and written by three named staff reporters of Times of India.

It describes in considerable detail the financial operations of the Maoists, analyses state-wise earnings from extortion, levies on businesses, poppy cultivation etc. and also delves into how this money is channeled into various states to run Maoist operations therein. Overall, it appears to provide convincing evidence that the Maoists are running a mafia under an ideological disguise. On reading, it seems to be a well researched piece of investigative journalism exclusively done for ToI by staff reporters. However everything did not seem to be so straightforward when nearly the same news story (in many places a word to word translation) was found to have been published in Bangla in the newspaper Icore Ekdin on 11th April. In Ekdin, the news was datelined New Delhi and described as “nijaswa pratibedan”, which means it was done by staff correspondents of Ekdin. On looking up on the internet, the thing became clearer.

The same report had appeared on 11th April

(1) in Central Chronicle (a Madhya Pradesh-based news portal) under the category News Flash, datelined Bhubaneswar and attributed to agencies;

(2) in Asian Age as a news story by a named correspondent;

(3) and in the Mumbai Mirror as a news story datelined Kolkata and again by a named correspondent.

The game was given away by the Mumbai Mirror story which attributes the news, even in the title of the news item, to intelligence agencies.

Therefore, what we see is that the same news story, including many common phrases and sentences, appearing in at least four different newspapers on the same day, three in English and one in Bangla (and also possibly in the Hindi press), and all claiming (except the Central Chronicle which attributes it to Agencies) that it is a piece of investigative journalism written by their staff reporters.

It is not even the case that the news first appeared in the Times of India (in the most detailed form) and was later copied by other newspapers, because the news appeared in all the papers (including in print) on the same day.

A quick Internet search traces the story about the Rs 1500 crore “empire” of the Maoists to an article that appeared in the intelligence agency-run blog Naxal Terror Watch on 6th June, 2009. It is clearly a news story that was planted by the intelligence agencies (which the Mumbai Mirror divulged) with the connivance of reputed national newspapers, as a piece of propaganda to malign their adversaries, the Maoists. Such plants, appearing innocuously as news stories, and then getting widely distributed, soon become “public wisdom” and provide fodder to talk show hosts and news channel anchors and to the Internet-savvy chatterati to push their own viewpoints in different fora and mould public opinion.

Courtesy: Countercurrents

Indian language newspapers forge ahead of English language papers

Sreenath Sreenivasan, writing in SAJA forum, draws attention to new statistics on newspaper circulations in India, released by Newswatch.in, a media watchdog organization.

He says:

The results make a fascinating read and are a wake-up call to anyone who, like me, has a lot more contact with the English media in India than with vernacular newspapers.

The Times of India is the country’s largest circulation English daily (13 million) and yet there are newspapers in five vernacular languages whose readership figures demolish that of the Times. Furthermore, the English dailies’ circulations have tended to contract slightly since last year while over the same period the Hindi dailies have made gains on the order of 1 to 3 million additional readers.
In Hindi, the top paper, Dainik Jagran, has a circulation of 56 million and the second place paper, Dainik Bhaskar, is read by 34 million people. Indeed, all five of the Hindi papers listed by newswatch.in have higher circulations than any English paper.

In Bengali, Ananda Bazar Patrika has a circulation of 15 million (while the local English-language paper, the Kolkata-based Telegraph, has a circulation of only 3 million).

Additionally, papers in Marathi, Tamil and Telegu have a higher circulation than the Times and if we lower the standard of comparison to the second-highest circulation English daily, Hindustan Times, which has 6 million readers, then there are more widely read papers in Gujarati, Kannada and Malayalam.

Of course these general statistics cannot answer some of the most interesting questions we might ask, such as whether the Hindi papers are read much outside the “Hindi belt” of north-central India or whether the English papers, smaller circulation figures notwithstanding, are actually more influential than any of the vernacular papers. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that it is indeed the case that the elite read English papers, and yet the statistics indicate that Hindi papers are rapidly expanding while three of the five English papers listed are slowly losing readers.

In any case, since the total readership of the top five Hindi papers is 160 million compared to 31 million for the top five English papers—which is a staggering difference, it looks like I should add Dainik Jagran to my daily media overload.

Article Writing Equals Sedition?

Is the police commissioner of a city an incarnation of the state itself? Any sane person will reply in the negative. Perhaps the (newly appointed) police commissioner of Ahmedabad has a different take on the whole issue, says Subash Gatade.

Gatade discusses the case of 'sedition and treason' against the Ahmedabad edition of the Times of India supposedly for carrying a series of articles on his alleged links with a Mafia Don.

Gatade’s article was circulated by countercurrents.org.

ToI Ahmedabad editor charged with conspiracy against state

Teesta Setalvad writes:

The Resident Editor of Times of India, Ahmedabad, Bharat Desai, has been charged with sedition and conspiring against the state. The charge is contained in a complaint lodged at at the Navrangpura Police Station in Ahmedabad at 3 am on Sunday, June 1.

The Times of India has been running a well documented campaign against the newly appointed Commissioner of Police OP Mathur for having criminal and underworld links.

The complaint has been lodged against Resident Editor, Times of India, Ahmedabad and reporter Prasant Dayal, and Gautam Maheta of Gujarat
Samachar under sections 120-B, 124-A and 34 of the IPC. CID crime is investigating the complaint.

Please protest and condemn. This is nothing short of an attack on the freedom of the press. Media associations, journalists unions and civil rights bodies must join in
the protest.

Today, journalists in Ahmedabad demonstrated outside the Commissioner
of Police's office at 11 am. Nationwide protests must folow.

Attached below are the downloaded clippings from TOI Ahmedabad and the
Complaint filed against Journalists and the Newspaper by the Gujarat
Police.

Teesta Setalvad

Attachments —

Times of India launches Chennai edition

The Times of India has reached Chennai to take on The Hindu after worsting market leaders in New Delhi and Bangalore in bitter battles in which it demonstrated its readiness to bend the rules of the game.

It had made a big impact outside the home turf of Mumbai in the last few years using the twin strategy of trivializing news and cutting the cover price.

It had been preparing for the Chennai entry for several years. “With a circulation of 3.5 million, we are today the world's largest English newspaper across formats, sizes and genres,” it declared in the Chennai edition, which was launched on April 14. “And yet, there has been this strange void. Call it a Chennai-shaped hole.

“We have long dreamed of having our masthead in the historic southern city of Chennai, where there is such a premium placed on the written word. In many ways, it was our final frontier - at least within India.”

The paper’s website featured the front page of the print edition (reproduced here) , and carried several letters from readers.

T.M.Premkumar, Chennai , wrote: “Dear Sir, We warmly welcome (you) to the City of charms and hospitality. Of late there has been a vacant slot for an unbiased newspaper. Every other newspaper here has developed a shade of political colour. I believe that every newspaper should present NEWS for its readers, and exhibit its VIEWS in its editorials. When the NEWS is coated with political HUES and VIEWS, it becomes unpalatable. I only pray and hope that the TIMES OF INDIA does not change its colours, and should concentrate on NEWS alone.

S. Bhaargavan of Coimbatore enquired when he could get the paper in his city.

The very first issue made a conscious attempt to woo the city’s large Malayalee community. In a report, headlined “Far from home, yet in touch with roots”, the paper took note of Vishu celebrations by those who did not get back home to Kerala.