People’s Media Against Monopoly Capital: A Conversation with P. Sainath
On fighting corporate media with journalism from below.
Illustration: Jamhoor
This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity. It is not an exact match of the audio interview.
Hadia: P. Sainath is an award-winning writer, journalist and activist. Currently based in Mumbai, he serves as the founder and editor of People's Archive of Rural India (PARI), which is an independent, multimedia, digital platform which showcases the stories of rural people and their impact on Indian politics and more. Hi Sainath!
P.Sainath: Hello Hadia!
Hadia: What inspired you to become a journalist?
P.Sainath: There was no grand design. I come from a freedom struggle family. Many of my grandfather’s generation, uncles, aunts - participated in the freedom struggle. The Indian press is really the child of the freedom struggle. There was no nationalist leader worth his or her name who did not double up as a journalist. Our greatest journalists were Gandhi, Ambedkar and Bhagat Singh. Not many people realize that Bhagat Singh was a professional journalist. He wrote in four languages: Hindi, Urdu, English, Punjabi. In his last 270 days in prison, he learned Persian and wrote something. He did all this before he was hanged at age 23. I began journalism at age 23. For anyone who felt close to the values of the freedom struggle, it seemed natural to go into the press because that is what all the freedom fighters I ever knew did.
Hadia: You worked in corporate media for a couple of decades. What made you decide to leave and start a people's media organization?
P.Sainath: The Indian media was in transition. I was very lucky to join the United News of India (UNI) (a news agency now in collapse) in 1980 soon after the collapse of the emergency. From 1977 onwards there was an explosion in media because the main business-owned media had crawled when asked only to bend, as the saying goes.
A lot of people who would not otherwise have gone into journalism went into it. I did my M.A. in History and was doing my PhD when I decided that journalism was far more interesting to me than academia.
“In the first 100 to 150 years of India’s media’s history, there’s much to be proud of. Before independence, most of the militant newspapers had been launched and nurtured by freedom fighters. ”
I worked in very different kinds of ownership platforms. UNI was a trust. These organizations were controlled by major newspapers who were providing themselves with a cheap news service. There was a relatively greater autonomy in UNI. Then I worked with. R.K. Karanjia in The Blitz. He made me the Deputy Chief Editor three months after I had joined for something else. I worked there for ten and half years. That was a family-owned newspaper. Then as a freelancer, my work appeared almost entirely in forums like the Times of India, which was family-owned but run on corporate lines.
In the first 100 to 150 years of India’s media’s history, there's much to be proud of. Before independence, most of the militant newspapers had been launched and nurtured by freedom fighters. Gandhi launched three, Ambedkar three. One freedom fighter, H.S. Doreswamy, who is in my book, The Last Heroes, is quite a character. He was running one newspaper but he registered it under six different titles. When the British shut down one, the next day the same paper, same publisher, same writers, would appear under a slightly different name – Peoples' Voice, Peoples’ Choice, Peoples’ Champion. It would be the same content. He drove them nuts with his behaviour.
Mooknayak (The Leader of the Voiceless) was a newspaper founded in 1920 by Dr. Ambedkar to highlight the oppression and struggles of the Dalit community. Image:Wikipedia.
After independence, the generation of freedom fighters were not able to sustain those newspapers. None of them went into journalism to make money. You don't make money in journalism. Maybe if you're a top 1% anchor, you make gigantic money. This is an idealism driven profession.
After independence, a number of these collapsing papers were taken over by big business houses, not yet corporations in the way that you and I understand corporations today. The restrictions on journalistic freedom had started already. There were two press commission held in India (in 1980 and 1984), led by leading lawyers, former Supreme Court judges and big intellectuals, etc. Both of them concluded that the greatest threat to press freedom in India came from business house ownership of newspapers.
In the 1980's, the Times of India embarked on the brave new corporate world. Until then, it had been a family-owned newspaper run on corporate lines. They destroyed journalist unions by shifting recruitment to a contract basis. Otherwise, journalists in India used to be tenured. You could join The Hindu and The Times and retire from The Hindu at The Times. And we used to be protected by a working journalists act, a very good act which is being trashed by the corporate owners. The courts give rulings against them but they still do it because they are that powerful.
My work appeared first in the Times of India and then The Hindu. I was very lucky to get into journalism when corporatization was not total and complete. It's a stranglehold these days. While there is a vibrant, independent media, their reach, scope and finances are limited. Last year, the Indian media and entertainment industry was worth $28 billion. When Ambani struck a deal with Disney, it became worth $36 billion. He was already the biggest owner of media, now quarter of the media industry is in his hands.
Hadia: Right now, Godi Media gets a lot of attention. But as you've described, corporatization has been happening for a few decades. Do you see a qualitative difference in how corporatization of media happened in the 90s versus the current moment of Adanis and Ambanis buying up media houses?
P. Sainath: Well, it is good old capitalism proceeding towards monopoly capitalism. Since the 1990s, there has been a shrinking of space. In the 90s, my book, Everybody Loves a Good Drought, got reviewed and is in its 63rd edition without one advertisement ever taken out for it.
My new book, The Last Heroes, is heading for its 6th edition, but nothing like the pace at which things happened in the 90s. It was a different world. Now, many of the newspapers don't have book pages. They don't have book reviews. If you want something, you pay for it. The Times does book reviews, but the biggest newspaper in the country does not.
Hadia: So, you would have to pay them to review your book?
P.Sainath: No, I wouldn't but let’s say you're a filmmaker who has made a brilliant film. And you go to the country's largest newspapers with it. If they like it, they want to buy into it. They’ll give it a dismissive review unless it becomes a super hit on its own, in which case they can't avoid it. It's as crude and sickeningly corrupt as that.
Hadia: Most people consume corporate media, and one view of corporate media is that it gives people the ruling class’s version of reality. It misinforms and misleads the masses. In my experience of corporate media in Pakistan, people watch it, but with a great deal of cynicism. They know which channels support which party, which channel supports the army, and they’ll know that there's money involved in this. But they still rely on corporate media for information. What do you think about this cynical consumption of information?
“In India, there is a relationship between wealth and media. The richest Indians are the biggest media owners”
P.Sainath: Some watch corporate media cynically, some shift to independent media. Corporate media has the power of propaganda because it is the only game in town.
Right now, the cutting edge of Hindi journalism is coming from young Youtubers in their 20s and early 30s in Uttar Pradesh. They predicted that the BJP would lose 40 seats in UP. At first, I was skeptical, but halfway through I began to see the signs. They had read things much better than any of us.
On the other hand, that the Government of India accounts for the largest number of Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter take-downs. They've devised new IT rules to do this. Even though the Bombay High Court has just declared them unlawful, they have the power to push and make life miserable for independent journalists.
And yet, these young journalists exist and are very feisty. They are fighting and get into very bad trouble. They're treated very roughly but they've kept that flag flying.
There are also a lot of local papers which are very good about their area. However, over the last 30 years, thousands of them have either gone bankrupt or have been bought by corporate media. While alternative and local media are doing fantastic jobs, corporate media has tens of millions in audience.
In India, there is a relationship between wealth and media. The richest Indians are the biggest media owners. Their money comes from their links to government, from getting leases on public property, oil, natural gas, mining, minerals and forestry. These are all public resources. If I’m a billionaire making money from property I’m renting from you (the government), why the hell would I ever carry something in my media company against you?
Corporate media journalists looked like complete morons when the results of the June elections came out. But it hasn't done much to change their behaviour because they're still owned by the same people. If there was another government in power tomorrow, some of them would automatically transfer their loyalties. They're in it for the money. That's the huge difference between the first 150 years of Indian journalism and the last half a century. The push for corporatization is getting greater. NDTV, which was the one decent channel we had, is now owned by Mr. Gautam Adani.
“We should use social media as much as we can but without illusions about where it comes from. It’s not a free space floating in the atmosphere. It is owned by giant monopolies. ”
Another attack on independent media comes from Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation (SLAPP). If you are a smart, young reporter doing enormous damage to a corporation, I hit you with a 100 crores notice. You'll go bankrupt fighting me, even if you eventually win the case. That’s happening to The Intercept and to Drop Site. You see them putting out appeals for funding to their subscribers saying this or that billionaire filed a case against them. Even when they win the case, they spend $300,000 on it. You win the case and lose the cause. This strategy has been adopted in most countries in the world by the super-rich, who have a legal department who've got nothing else to do except to get on your back. That is another major threat to independent journalism.
Gautam Adani with Narendra Modi in 2011. Adani’s business interests continue to flourish under Modi, including his takeover of one of India’s leading news channels, the NDTV.
Hadia: Some scholars argue that the expansion of spaces where people can articulate their political opinions has counterintuitively led to a closing of spaces of democratic deliberation. Whether it’s social or independent media, the circulation of the message - how many times something gets tweeted - becomes more important than whether the content of the message leads to political struggle. The circulation of the message becomes a political act in and of itself. What do you think about that?
P.Sainath: When the internet first arrived, it was similarly romanticized, that everybody would be their own newspaper. However, it is an incredibly monopolized space. I went from being a print media journalist my whole life to moving into the digital space because it is a zone of relative autonomy. But I don't count on it being there forever. That space is shrinking.
Digital media allows us a much lower cost. Starting a print newspaper in India costs tens of millions of dollars. You have to be able to sustain losses for five to eight years before you break even. Only corporations can do that deep pocket stuff.
We should use social media as much as we can but without illusions about where it comes from. It's not a free space floating in the atmosphere. It is owned by giant monopolies. Digital monopolies are the nastiest ones in human history. No other monopoly in history, whether it was oil, shipping or gold, has owned and traded in your personal data. I call them human data traffickers.
If you write an e-mail to your parents in Peshawar today that you are thinking of going to Brazil for a holiday. How many hundreds of ads are you going to see popping up about recommendations and hotels? The human race is being algorithmed out of its intellect.
Facebook and Twitter are charging you subscriptions fees essentially. Even if you have 100,000 followers on Twitter, you can only reach 2% of them through a message. Anything beyond that is paid posts. They are charging you a fee to be able to talk to your followers. That’s as nasty as it gets.
In the Cambridge Analytica case exposure, they admitted that 50,000 accounts in India were compromised during elections. This was a predetermined electoral strategy, enabled by Facebook, to scuttle their opponents’ political campaigns.
Peoples Archive of rural India was the only one that covered the incredible width and depth of the farmers’ protests in 2020-21. We have thousands of articles on farmers, but we have an entire section on farmers protests. When the big farmers protest began in November 2020 November, PARI’s reach doubled or trebled. And then suddenly it all stopped. The Government of India made a request to Google. The algorithm was tweaked and search for farmers’ protests searches fell by 60%.
“The New York Times and The Washington Post look like a bunch of idiots. I bet you a very large number of journalists working for those publications are acutely aware that their paper is making them look like idiots. ”
The Facebook whistleblower in the US Congress said that the largest number of take-down requests came from the Government of India, and that they acceded to them. Elon Musk said that Government of India asked him to do this. He said that while he thought it was wrong of them, he did it anyway. Facebook gets a giant share of their revenue from the Indian market. Why would they screw around with the Indian government?
Hadia: In these circumstances, what chance does people's media have? Historically, people's media organizations were tied to mass parties. In the absence of that infrastructure, how do we sustain ourselves?
P. Sainath: The problems affecting the media are so large and complex, spread across the social, economic and political spectrum that you cannot find solutions for them within the media sector. For instance, can you solve the problems of education from within your university? No, it's the larger social, political spectrum that you have to work on. Similarly, independent media has to be linked to larger struggles of society: the farmers and labourers. We have to confront corporate power and break monopoly. That is the precondition for a real transformation.
Corporate media also a tendency to screw itself. They’re losing credibility in India. Or just look at The New York Times or The Washington Post. For a decade, they have been the voice of American foreign policy. How many days have passed and there is yet to be an editorial on the explosions of pagers and phones in Lebanon. You cannot conceive of a more disgusting war crime. And yet, no editorials.
In The New York Times, the one story I saw says 485 people died in Lebanon. Immediately below, it starts with “Hezbollah fired so many rockets into Israel”, as if that was the trigger for the massacres. The New York Times and The Washington Post look like a bunch of idiots. I bet you a very large number of journalists working for those publications are acutely aware that their paper is making them look like idiots.
The New York War Crimes is a free newspaper by Writers Against the War on Gaza, playing on the New York Times title to highlight its complicity in the coverage of the war.
“As horrible as it is, what’s happening in Palestine is seriously exposing the media. This is genocide live. The establishment media doesn’t want to say anything about it. On the other hand, the kids coming out in colleges to protest are not being led by these newspapers, by Fox News.”
Monopoly media is not being liberated by social media. They're being challenged or replaced by newer, more dangerous monopolies. Independent media can bring some improvement, but if you want a lasting transformation then you have to fight monopoly. It has been done before. In the United States in 1912, anti-trust laws broke up Standard Oil into seven companies. Similar moves were made in Hollywood. In the 1980s, Reagan undid many of these legislations. The Nordic countries have a number of restrictions on how much of media you can ow. Historically, it has been done. It's going to be horribly difficult but it can and will be done.
Hadia: And in the meantime, what kind of people’s media organizations or work are you inspired by? Media that has made a dent in the corporate media world?
P.Sainath: The era in which you could depend on one newspaper, one magazine or one channel for all your information needs died 30 years ago. Now, you have to curate different sources for yourself. Make your own paper every morning, so to speak.
I read counterpunch.org. It's a fabulous publication. Founded by Alexander Cockburn, an old friend and now run by another dear friend, Jeffrey St. Clair. There have been experiments like The Intercept. You seem to get help from a Jeff Bezos at one level, and then he pulls the plug when things don’t look good. Bezos now owns The Washington Post. It’s an uphill battle and there is pretty good resistance.
As horrible as it is, what’s happening in Palestine is seriously exposing the media. This is genocide live. The establishment media doesn’t want to say anything about it. On the other hand, the kids coming out in colleges to protest are not being led by these newspapers like Fox News.
Hadia: I want to move on to talking about the agrarian crisis in India and South Asia more broadly. Your work has historically centred on the rural. Why should we care about the rural? Why is it important to understand politics and economy more broadly?
P. Sainath: If I don't care about the rural, I don't care about 69% of the Indian population. Worldwide, the rural is in retreat and the retreat has seen the rise of corporate power. There's an excellent film about American farming, how the corporations took over and how this led to cutbacks in farming. The greatest agrarian crisis in the world, which is happening in India right now, all happened 40 years ago in the United States when they brought their farming population from 25% to 1% of the total population.
“Here’s the agrarian crisis in five words: The corporate hijack of Indian agriculture. The process by which that is achieved in five words: Predatory commercialization of the countryside. The result of that in five words: Greatest displacement in human history. That is the agrarian crisis.”
Urbanization, with cities populated by 20 to 25 million people, is not sustainable. Experts say that agriculture must be or mechanized and automated, that there are too many people in agriculture. They should be released from it to go to industry. Well, we did not create a single job in industry, but displaced tens of millions from agriculture. They go to the cities and provide us cheap labour. They become your nanny, my driver, your mochi (cobbler), my darzi (tailor). These are skilled farmers. They know how to grow food that you and I don't.
Hadia: For decades, there has been a debate on the agrarian crisis and the agrarian question that has dominated and divided the Indian Left. People have debated relationship between agriculture and capital, whether India's countryside is semi-feudal or capitalist or something else. There are questions about the political orientation of rural, subaltern classes, about which peasant class will constitute the revolutionary class. I imagine you've gained a lot of insight into this question through your work in the countryside.
P.Sainath: I'll spare your audience of a debate in mothballs and I'll spare them the jargon. Here's the agrarian crisis in five words: The corporate hijack of Indian agriculture. The process by which that is achieved in five words: Predatory commercialization of the countryside. The result of that in five words: Greatest displacement in human history. That is the agrarian crisis.
During the farmers protests in 2021, for the first time since independence, the Indian peasantry directly confronted the corporate world. Every slogan was about Ambani and Adani. The last time the Indian peasantry confronted a corporation, it was called the East India Company.
In the newspapers and TV channels, experts don’t have a clue what agrarian even means. They use the word interchangeably with agriculture, which is wrong. When we talk of agriculture, we're talking about the cultivator and the farm labourer at most. But the agricultural economy is much more than that. It includes your village carpenter, baker, tailor and weaver. Forest gatherers and fishing communities all come under agriculture in the Indian census now. Agrarian society includes the hundreds of millions of people who are not cultivators but dependent on the agricultural economy.
The debate on which of these will be the revolutionary class, I find boring. The focus on the industrial has been to the detriment of the peasantry. All the anti-colonial freedom struggles in South Asia, in Africa, happened with the peasantry in alliance with the working class. Many of us who think in these terms have started the Kisan Mazdoor Commission. The commission is composed of representatives of primary classes, farmers and pastoral nomads. I am a founder but not a member of the Commission. We are non-farming intellectuals who help.
During COVID, there were gigantic industrial labor strikes in support of the farmers protests which the media told you nothing about. Tens of millions of workers were striking very successfully in 20 states, not just in Punjab or Haryana.
We should always see the farmers and workers as part of an alliance. We also have to think about how to get in the other elements of agrarian society. How do we get those migrants in? How do we get those weavers in? Incidentally, before the farmers suicides, the first suicides in India under the new economic policies were those of weavers. Because when farming goes bankrupt, the weaver is dead.
During the 20 years I worked on this, I noticed that where farmers were killing themselves, the carpenter was dying of starvation. Farmers pay weavers and carpenters in kind in grain. If the farmer commits suicide, and no one orders a new bullock cart or a plough from the carpenter, what does he do? We need a gigantic alliance of the dispossessed.
Farmers at the protests in 2021. Image: Reuters.
Hadia: What kinds of potentials exist of creating an alliance between the peasantry and migrants who go back and forth between rural and urban areas?
P.Sainath: When a sympathy meeting was held in Mumbai in the Azad Maidan, all the farmer leaders of Maharashtra and trade union leaders were speaking in solidarity. The podiums were built by migrant workers who were farmers in those states. This happened organically without anyone planning it. What could happen if we planned these alliances?
In the US, the most famous thing that ever happened in in this millennium was Occupy Wall Street. A wonderful and idealistic movement of mostly young people. They succeeded brilliantly in focusing on the idea of the 1% versus the 99%. I was teaching in the United States at that time. Thousands of people occupied Zuccotti Park. After nine weeks, the NYPD cleared them out.
In India, the 100,000 Indian farmers who marched on Delhi and were stopped at its gates and met with incredible brute force. The government of the nation dug 20 ft. by 10 ft. trenches in the highway making themselves liable to punishment under their own laws about the destruction of public property. They put Kilometers of concertina barbed wire. They called in all kinds of forces - Border Security Force, the Central Industrial Security Force, Punjab Police, Delhi Police, Haryana police. They were all there to hit protesters with water cannon. Several people died. 80-year-olds who were protesting in the worst winter seen in 40 years were hit with icy cold water. What do you think happens to them? And those farmers? They still could not be thrown out.
With all these security forces, I wrote a piece saying that there was a bigger mobilization there than on the actual Line of Control with China. And we are fighting our own people, our own citizens. This February, the government made us the first nation in the world to use drone warfare against our own farmers. Tear gas canisters attached to the spider legs of big drones were dropped on the farmers. They injured two journalists. A tear gas canister on your head is not going to do your skull much good.
Despite all this, farmers held out for 54 weeks until they won their demand and the government repealed the unjust laws. No one in corporate media will tell you that this was the largest struggle for justice in the world in 30 years, organized at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. All kinds of police action failed to move the makeshift township that they made at the border of Delhi. 720 died of COVID, of hypothermia in the worst winter in 40 years and the worst summer in a decade. And still they hung in there and gave the rest of us a lesson in the meaning of resistance. This is what resistance means. It was a peaceful, democratic, constitutional legal protest.
Hadia: That's beautiful. Thank you so much, P. Sainath. It was a complete pleasure to talk to you and to hear from you. And I hope that PARI and you succeed in the work that you're doing.
P.Sainath: Thank you, Hadia.
This interview was facilitated by the Cornell South Asia Program.
Hadia Akhtar Khan is part of the Jamhoor collective and an anthropologist of rural Pakistan.