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EDITORIALS
Limits Of Pursuit
The sleaze of Tehelka journalism is not worth
the
naked truth
 If
journalism is the pursuit of truth, the Tehelka tapes have captured the
naked truth. And if every method is acceptable to reach the truth, those
tapes have no doubt taught Indian journalism one or two morality lessons.
In the first part, it was all very disgusting, and that grainy image of
Bangaru Laxman putting a price tag to himself (and how cheap it was!)
would certainly outlive him. Then, the merciless hidden camera, journalism's
risky romance, was worth the truth. Now, one more set of images -part
pornography, part inducement, part honeytrap-is out. From the Tehelka
team's point of view, it is all in the name of truth-a little sex service
for the larger social service. Though this time the romance of the so-called
investigative journalism stinks. Is it worth the truth? Not really, the
truth has already been established, and the call girl operation has revealed
nothing more, except, of course, vulnerabilities of the already discredited.
And here comes the ethics question, the limits
of pursuit. Are methods that are not socially or legally acceptable journalistically
acceptable? The Gotcha morality of the tabloids will say dammit. But responsible
journalism, or quality journalism, cannot afford to be independent of
ethics. The best example is the American quality press, whose almost fanatical
obsession with ethics is born of a sense of fairness. That doesn't mean
that the romance of the amateur has no place there, what with the all-time
great in that department, the Watergate. And, let it be clear, this internally
devised sense of fairness is not the same as the code of ethics enforced
from above by the truth police. If journalism requires an unwritten code
of ethics, only journalists, no one else, are qualified to enforce it.
The investigative spirit of the Tehelka camera has gone beyond the limits
of responsibility. In spite of the naked truth.
Rights And Resolution
In this world national rights are as important as human rights
 The
subjects are too sensitive to be generalised-one moral, the other national.
But the face- off between human rights and national security has taken
a kind of political turn. Human rights, as they are being practised anywhere
in this big bad world, are all about politically convenient idealism-ask
the Chinese. But India is a different country, with a genuine terrorist
problem that continues to challenge its patience as well as national well-being.
So Home Minister L.K. Advani has a point, rather a national point, when
he proposes amnesty to security personnel accused of, well, human-rights
violations. The interesting thing is, his detractors too have a point:
national duty doesn't mean you are above the law. These are incompatible
positions. The human-rights activists, however, should not make their
position so absolute.
The term "human rights" lost its absolute
status long ago with all those Rwandas and Bosnias and Gazas. The struggle
between national determination and the rights, the combat between national
resolution and the liberation struggle ... and there is bound to be a
victim, always, and it is not all that easy to reach an absolute conclusion
through a morality test. And don't overlook a stark reality: in every
struggle there is one recurring adjective-national. That was a very serious
issue in Punjab once. Take Kashmir, and who can deny that out there the
security forces are involved in a life-threatening battle against religious
terrorists? It is easy to caricature every nationalist as a mad Milosevic.
But it is not so easy to keep the nation free of its enemies. In a world
where somebody's right is somebody else's denial, please remember that
national rights are as important as human rights.
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