The real enemies of press freedom are in the newsroom

The principal threat to expression comes not from state regulation but from censorship by editors and proprietors

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 30 June 2014 20.48 BST

‘A political monoculture afflicts much of the press. Reports that might reveal a different side of the story remain unwritten.' Photograph: Tetra Images/Corbis

Three hundred years of press freedom are at risk, the newspapers cry. The government's proposed press regulator, they warn, threatens their independence. They have a respectable case, when you can extract it from the festoons of sticky humbug. Because of the shocking failures, so far, of self-regulation, I'm marginally in favour of the state solution. But I can also see the dangers.

Those who cry loudest against the regulator, however, recognise only one kind of freedom. In countries such as ours, the principal threat to freedom of expression comes not from government but from within the media. Censorship, in most cases, happens in the newsroom.

No newspaper has been more outspoken about what it calls "a chill over press freedom" than the Daily Mail. Though I agree with almost nothing it says, I would defend its freedom from state censorship as fiercely as I would defend the Guardian's. But, to judge by what it publishes, within the paper there is no freedom at all. There is just one line – echoed throughout its pages – on Europe, social security, state spending, tax, regulation, immigration, sentencing, trade unions and workers' rights. Labour is always too far to the left, even when it stands for nothing at all. Witness the self-defeating headline on Monday: "Red Ed 'won't unveil any policies in case they scare off voters'." Ed is red even when he's grey.

This suggests either that any article offering dissenting views is purged with totalitarian rigour, or general secretary Paul Dacre's terrified minions, knowing what is expected of them, never make such mistakes in the first place.

A similar political monoculture afflicts much of the press. Reports that might reveal a different side of the story remain unwritten. A free market in news is not the same as a free press, unless freedom is defined so narrowly that it refers only to the power of government, rather than to the power of money.

The monomania of the proprietors – or the editors they appoint in their own image – is compounded by an insidious, incestuous culture. The hacking trial revealed a world, as Suzanne Moore notes, of "sleepovers, dinners, flowers and presents ... in which genuine friendship is replaced by nightmare networking". A world in which one prime minister becomes godfather to a proprietor's child and another borrows an editor's horse, and an industry that is supposed to hold power to account brokers a seamless marriage between loot and boot.

On Mount Olympus, the gods pronounce upon issues that afflict only mortals: columnists with private-health plans support the savaging of the NHS; editors who educate their children privately heap praise upon Michael Gove, knowing that their progeny won't suffer his assault on state schools.

It doesn't matter, the defenders of these papers say: there are plenty of outlets, so balance can be found across the spectrum. But the great majority of papers, local as well as national, are owned by exceedingly rich people or their companies, and reflect their views. The owners, in the words of Max Hastings, once editor of the Daily Telegraph, are members of "the rich men's trade union", who "feel an instinctive sympathy for fellow multimillionaires". The field as a whole is unbalanced.

So pervasive are these voices that they seem to dominate even outlets they do not own. As Robert Peston, the BBC's economics editor, said last month, BBC News "is completely obsessed by the agenda set by newspapers ... if we think the Mail and Telegraph will lead with this, we should. It's part of the culture."

An analysis by researchers at Cardiff University found a deep and growing bias in the BBC in favour of bosses and against trade unions: five to one on the 6 o'clock news in 2007; 19 to one in 2012. Coverage of the banking crisis – caused by bankers – was overwhelmingly dominated, another study shows, by interviews with, er, bankers. As a result there was little serious challenge to their demand for bailouts and their resistance to regulation. Mike Berry, who conducted the research, says the BBC "tends to reproduce a Conservative, Eurosceptic, pro-business version of the world".

Last week, a brilliant and popular columnist for the Times, Simon Barnes, was sacked after 32 years. He was told that the paper could no longer afford his wages. But he wondered whether it might have something to do with the fierce campaign he's been waging against the owners of grouse moors, who have been wiping out the rare hen harriers that eat their quarry. It seems at first glance ridiculous: why would someone be sacked for grousing about grouse? But after experiencing the furious seigneurial affront with which a former senior editor at the Times, Magnus Linklater, responded to my enquiries about his 4,000-acre estate in Scotland and his failure to declare this interest while excoriating the RSPB for trying to protect hen harriers, I'm not so sure. This issue is of disproportionate interest to the rich men's trade union.

The two explanations might not be incompatible: if a paper owned by a crabby oligarch wanted to sack people for reasons of economy, it might look first at those engendering complaints among the owner's fellow moguls. The Times has yet to give me a comment.

Over the past few weeks, Private Eye has published several alarming claims about what it sees as censorship by the Telegraph on behalf of its advertisers. It says that extra stars have been added to film reviews, and that a story claiming HSBC had overstated its assets was spiked from on high so as not to offend the companies that pay the rent. The Telegraph told me: "We do not comment on inaccurate pieces from a satirical magazine like Private Eye."

Whatever the truth in these cases may be, it does not take journalists long to learn where the snakes lurk and the ladders begin. As the journalist Hannen Swaffer remarked long ago: "Freedom of the press ... is freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to." Yes, let's fight censorship: of the press and by the press.

The silencing of liberal India

Pratap Bhanu Mehta in The Indian Express

Yet another book withdrawn and pulped by the publisher under pressure. The “pulping” of Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, is the pulping of liberal India. The agreement by the publisher to withdraw it is like putting a contract out on free expression. In India you publish at your peril. It is in a shockingly long line of books and art withdrawn from free circulation one way or the other, sometimes against the law, sometimes in the garb of law.

India is a democracy, but its reputation as a bastion of liberal values is dimming by the day. The argumentative Indian is being replaced by the offended Indian, the tolerant Indian by the intolerant mob, the reflective citizen by the hurt communal mobiliser, the courageous Indian by the cowardly thug who needs the state to protect it against every argument, the pious Indian by the ultimate blasphemer who thinks he needs to protect the gods rather than the gods being there to protect him. Whether this is a tiny minority or represents the majority is beside the point. The point is that the assault on free expression is winning. How is liberal India being silenced?

Liberal India is being silenced because its joy at exposing hypocrisy is far greater than its commitment to defending freedom. Every time a book is under assault, the same tiresome argument breaks out. “Oh, you did not speak when so and so was banned. You did not speak when Taslima Nasreen was the target, or when Jitender Bhargava was ordered to withdraw his book on Air India.” Or there is the partisan division: you did not object to what the Congress did to Salman Rushdie, or the CPM in West Bengal.

The point is that we spend all our psychic energies in exposing each other, not in defending values. If freedom is to survive, we have to set aside this debate on hypocrisy. It devours all energy. But it also legitimises the disposition that is at the heart of banning books: a fragile ego that takes joy in revenge, rather than taking pride in freedom. Let us get on with the task of defending the core values.

Liberal India has been silenced because it never understood that toleration does not, to use Govind Ranade’s phrase, come in halves. You cannot pick and choose when to be tolerant. You cannot choose to be tolerant along partisan lines. Neither can you choose to be tolerant based on what you think are distinctions between good and bad scholarship, serious and scurrilous books. These distinctions are a good basis for criticism; they are not the best basis for deciding whom the law will protect. And R.V. Bhasin, author of a banned book on Islam, will be protected as much as Wendy Doniger. And so it should be. If you want a hundred flowers to bloom, a few weeds will grow as well.

Liberal India has been silenced because the one institution that needs to protect it constantly fails: the courts. Civil society and politics have a lot to answer for. But the incentives to mobilise around the banning of books have largely been created by the laws and by the convoluted jurisprudence of the courts. A law that signals that it is open to banning books will incite mobilisations to ban books. If the state gives the category of taking easy “offence” such aid and succour, offence will be easily taken.

In the case of Doniger’s book, there seems to have been no threat of the book provoking large-scale violence. Despite protest and criticism, the book has been in circulation. But more importantly, the courts have sown the seeds of further confusion. For example, the Bombay High Court judgment on the Bhasin case upheld the idea that it is “no defence that the writing contains a truthful account of past events or is supported by good authority.” Courts uphold the idea that the criticism of religion must only be “academic”, whatever that means. Lampooing is part of legitimate criticism.

While banning the novel, Dharamkaarana, they showed no regard for the artistic integrity of the work. Courts should be the bully pulpit of constitutional values. They should draw strong lines protecting freedom. No wonder liberals worry that the court will not rescue them. No wonder the mere threat of litigation is a dampener on free expression.

Liberal India has been silenced by professional offence-mongers. Those who now claim to speak on behalf of communities use every trick they can to silence. There is often the threat of violence. The use of law is not, in this instance, an exercise of citizens’ rights. It is the use of law as a tactic of intimidation. Often, these groups have the implicit backing of political parties. No political party in Maharashtra stood up for the rights of scholars. As a result of the James Laine episode, most publishers do not want to even touch books on Shivaji.

The BJP’s relationship with groups that initiate these mobilisations has often been one of plausible deniability. It gives aid and succour to vicious offence mongering, it legitimises this contrived narrative of Hindu hurt. All it needs to do to overcome these suspicions is come clean and emphatically state that it does not support the “withdrawal” of books. We do not need political parties that take on the garb of liberalism by avoiding issues; we need political parties that actually defend liberal values.

Liberal India has been let down by its publishers. If major presses like Oxford University Press (OUP) and Penguin cave in to the threat of litigation so easily and fail to take matters up to the Supreme Court, it will become easier for people to intimidate. Recall OUP’s conduct in the case of the Calcutta High Court banning a scholarly monograph by Hans Dembowski on the judiciary. Indian business is supine because it feels politically vulnerable at so many different levels.

Liberal India has been silenced by its educators. The extraordinary failure of the project of liberal education is manifesting itself in the pathology of liberal institutions. If so many of India’s educated middle classes, which inhabit key institutions like the judiciary, bureaucracy, media, are so confused about basic constitutional values, if they are so content at liberty being abridged, one by one, you have to wonder about liberal education.

The fact that universities themselves did not remain exemplars of criticism, that they banished a healthy engagement with tradition has meant that the most ignorant and violent have now become the custodians of tradition. Wendy Doniger could not have damaged Hindus. But if Liberal India dies, Hinduism will die as well.

The truth about the criminal bloodbath in Iraq can't be 'countered' indefinitely

The media cover-up has been a weapon in the crimes of western states since the first world war. But a reckoning is coming for those paid to keep the record straight

• 
• • John Pilger
  • The Guardian, Friday 7 February 2014 16.30 GMT

A baby in a Baghdad hospital in July 2003. 'Half a million Iraqi infants died as a result of sanctions, according to Unicef.' Photograph: Joseph Barrak/AFP/Getty Images

The BBC's Today programme is enjoying high ratings, and the Mail and Telegraph are, as usual, attacking the corporation as leftwing. Last month a single edition of the Radio 4 show was edited by the artist and musician PJ Harvey. What happened was illuminating.

Harvey's guests caused panic from the moment she proposed the likes of Mark Curtis, a historian rarely heard on the BBC who chronicles the crimes of the British state; the lawyer Phil Shiner and the Guardian journalist Ian Cobain, who reveal how the British kidnap and torture; the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange; and myself.

There were weeks of absurd negotiation at Broadcasting House about ways of "countering" us and whether or not we could be allowed to speak without interruption from Today's establishment choristers. What this brief insurrection demonstrated was the fear of a reckoning. The crimes of western states like Britain have made accessories of those in the media who suppress or minimise the carnage.

The Faustian pacts that contrived a world war a century ago resonate today across the Middle East and Asia, from Syria to Japan. Then, as now, cover-up was the principal weapon. In 1917 David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, declared: "If people knew the truth, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and can't know."

On Harvey's Today programme I referred to a poll conducted by ComRes last year that asked people in Britain how many Iraqis had been killed as a result of the 2003 invasion.A majority said that fewer than 10,000 had been killed: a figure so shockingly low it was a profanity.

I compared this with scientific estimates of "up to a million men, women and children [who] had died in the inferno lit by Britain and the US". In fact, academic estimates range from less than half a million to more than a million. John Tirman, the principal research scientist at the MIT Centre for International Studies, has examined all the credible estimates; he told me that an average figure "suggests roughly 700,000". Tirman pointed out that this excluded deaths among the millions of displaced Iraqis, up to 20% of the population.

The day after the Harvey programme, Today "countered" with Toby Dodge of the LSE – a former adviser to General Petraeus, one of the architects of the disasters in both Iraq and Afghanistan – along with Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a former Iraqi "national security adviser" in the occupation regime, and the man who led Saddam Hussein to his lynching.

These BBC-accredited "experts" rubbished, without evidence, the studies and reduced the number of dead by hundreds of thousands. The interviewer, Mishal Husain, offered no challenge to their propaganda. They then "debated" who was responsible. Lloyd George's dictum held; culpability was diverted.

But for how long? There is no question that the epic crime committed in Iraq has burrowed into the public consciousness. Many recall that "shock and awe" was the extension of a murderous blockade imposed for 13 years by Britain and the US and suppressed by much of the mainstream media, including the BBC. Half a million Iraqi infants died as a result of sanctions, according to Unicef. I watched children dying in hospitals, denied basic painkillers.

Ten years later, in New York, I met the senior British official responsible for these "sanctions". He is Carne Ross, once known in the UN as "Mr Iraq". He is now a truth-teller. I read to him a statement he had made to a parliamentary select committee in 2007: "The weight of evidence clearly indicates that sanctions caused massive human suffering among ordinary Iraqis, particularly children. We, the US and UK governments, were the primary engineers and offenders of sanctions and were well aware of the evidence at the time but we largely ignored it and blamed it on the Saddam government … effectively denying the entire population the means to live."

I said to him: "That's a shocking admission."

"Yes, I agree," he replied. "I feel ashamed about it ..." He described how the Foreign Office manipulated a willing media. "We would control access to the foreign secretary as a form of reward to journalists. If they were critical, we would not give them the goodies of trips around the world. We would feed them factoids of sanitised intelligence, or we'd freeze them out."

In the build-up to the 2003 invasion, according to studies by Cardiff University andMedia Tenor, the BBC followed the Blair government's line and lies, and restricted airtime to those opposing the invasion. When Andrew Gilligan famously presented a dissenting report on Today, he and the director general were crushed.

The truth about the criminal bloodbath in Iraq cannot be "countered" indefinitely. Neither can the truth about our support for the medievalists in Saudi Arabia, the nuclear-armed predators in Israel, the new military fascists in Egypt and the jihadist "liberators" of Syria, whose propaganda is now BBC news. There will be a reckoning – not just for the Blairs, Straws and Campbells, but for those paid to keep the record straight.

Big Brother BCCI's Watching!

Sharda Ugra in Economics and Political Weekly

In May and June this year, when the Indian Premier League (IPL) was, much to its self-regarding outrage, being hauled away for questioning, N Srinivasan, president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), found himself trailed by reporters, cameras and mikes. Distinctly displeased, as he headed for his car on one occasion, Srinivasan (Srini, to friends) barked out: “Why are you hounding me?” The simple answer? His son-in-law, Gurunath Meiyappan, “high official/team principal” of the Chennai Super Kings, Srinivasan’s beloved IPL team, had been arrested by the Mumbai police for placing bets during the IPL. On the day in question, Srinivasan was three stories on two legs – BCCI chief, IPL team owner, father-in-law. The most powerful man in cricket tripped up by a black sheep in the family who had toppled his business. What’s not to hound? A simple answer to that question: because Srini was in the dock, because the media are hounds, because they – we – can.

It was a twisted, ironic turning of the tables on the man under whose regime BCCI has become not only enormously richer but also enormously in control of the messages around Indian cricket. During the IPL corruption scandal, those messages, for perhaps the first time in his reign, had gone out of Srinivasan’s control. His otherwise glacial disdain for a notoriously fickle 24×7 media was suddenly put under unrelenting headlights and left unprotected by either his position or influence.

BCCI’s relationship with the independent, mainstream media has gone from general chumminess to a teeth-gritting tolerance on either side. During the last five years, the time when Srinivasan rose from BCCI treasurer to secretary to president, the Board has become more determined to tighten an iron-fisted grip over the media, starting with the medium that generates the bulk of its revenues and reaches an audience of millions – television.

In 2008, BCCI put Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri on its payroll with gargantuan price tags. “Sunny & Ravi” Inc became mandatory mascots, required to be on commentary duty wherever India played, regardless of who owned the TV rights. The two most influential Indian voices on cricket television were safely co-opted. Their signing coincided with the advent of the IPL and the rise of BCCI’s Midas-like monetiser, Lalit Modi. The Gavaskar-Shastri duopoly was a beginning. As revenues skyrocketed through the IPL, BCCI set up its own independent TV production unit. This new team (partly cannibalised from Neo Sports/Nimbus who owned the TV rights to cricket in India until 2012) even purchased its own outside broadcast vans. Ownership over Indian cricket was to be established at every level.

Much of this could be put down to Lalit Modi’s desire to commercialise every inch of the Indian cricket “property”. But when the first round of IPL sleaze excised Modi from the system in 2010, his philosophy was kept alive. India’s wealth had earned it the right to become cricket’s Big Brother. When, during the 2011 tour of England, former England captain Nasser Hussain criticised BCCI’s obduracy over the Decision Review System (DRS), Shastri’s rebuttal was slightly petulant:

England are jealous about the way IPL is going, jealous that India is No.1 in world cricket, jealous that India are world champions. They are jealous because of too much money being made by BCCI.

The repercussions of that skirmish went deep when England toured India a year later. Star Sports won “media rights” for all cricket played in India but BCCI retained its hold over production rights. Through production came the full force of Big Brother’s thought police. Commentators on the home networks were told that three topics were taboo, never to be brought up on air: selection, administration and DRS.

Then followed a bitter battle over the cost of providing space and access to Sky TV and BBC radio in the broadcast areas at grounds. Sky had paid Star for the world feed, but a BCCI official huffily asked why the Sky commentary team should be given access in Indian grounds without a cost: “So that Hussain and others can come here and criticise India?” The inability to accept criticism was turned into a national project. Sky’s expert team worked out of studios in west London.

BCCI then refused accreditation to photo agency Getty Images for its use of Indian cricket pictures for commercial gain rather than editorial purposes. A media coalition made of wire services like Reuters, Associated Press (AP) and Agence France-Presse (AFP) boycotted the matches in protest.

Most certainly, there are commercial constraints at work in each of these incidents. In the past, overseas broadcasters have talked through requirements and arrived at agreeable fees or quid pro quo arrangements. Even in the case of the England tour, solutions could have been worked out, but BCCI chose to bring in the heavies. Sanjay Manjrekar, who did studio work for the England series for Star had tweeted “Fans like Boycott. Only guy who is free from BCCI shackles on our show”, before pulling it off his Twitter account. The kerfuffle with Getty continues; when Australia toured India in early 2013, Ian Chappell refused to be a part of the commentary team because of BCCI’s unwritten three-point don’t-do list. Commentary during the series sounded programmed and tinny: catches that went down after hitting Virat Kohli on the chest and M S Dhoni on his wrist were called “half-chances”.

In the IPL that followed, commentators Danny Morrison and H D Ackerman, in their high-volume excitement, introduced Virat Kohli, talking of him as a possible “future captain of India”. That happened to be the last IPL game both worked on. Big Brother was watching and listening.

Since the IPL’s second round of sleaze hit the headlines (but not on IPLTV, where the game’s greats made no reference to it), there came one final squeeze – this time, on the players. “Quiet words” have been had with Virat Kohli, Cheteshwar Pujara and Rohit Sharma for giving interviews to newspapers. Sharma called up one reporter, requesting him to spike the interview. This, after the players had produced the best news around Indian cricket in months – by winning the Champions Trophy.

On 19 July, 35 contracted players were sent an email which read:

Dear All, Trust you are well. You are requested to refrain from giving interviews to the media, without the prior, written permission of the BCCI. Regards, Sanjay Patel, Hony. Secretary, BCCI.

Never let it be said the BCCI’s Ministry of Truth doesn’t fill in its paperwork.

Google shows China the white flag of surrender

By Mic Wright Tech business Last updated: January 7th, 2013 

Google's message to Beijing

Six months ago, Google loudly trumpeted a brave stand against censorship in China. Now it's quietly committed an act of cowardice. In May 2012, it announced an anti-censorship feature – under the pretext of improving search quality – with a public blog post. In December, it got rid of the measure which notified Chinese users when keywords they were searching for would trigger the country's Great Firewall content blocking system – without telling its users. The switch-off only came to light thanks to the vigilance of Greatfire.org, a not-for-profit organisation that monitors censorship in China. The group called the move "self-censorship" but it's worse than that – it's a white flag of surrender.

From the moment Google introduced the feature, the Chinese internet censors fought back. But the ingenuity of Google's engineers got round each block until they finally embedded the entire function in HTML on Google's start page. That meant to block the notifications, China would have to block Google altogether. Inevitably, the search engine did end up blocked in its entirety more than once before the feature been activated. Gmail was also subject to blocks and a noticeable slowdown in performance. In the stand-off, Google blinked first. At a time when the Chinese government is strengthening its internet censorship measures, the firm has effectively admitted it just can't beat them and is no longer willing to try.

Though Google's share of search in China is under five per cent, that still amounts to more than 25 million users, and despite moving its services to Hong Kong in 2010, it won't abandon that market. Reports in recent weeks have suggested that it's on the cusp of a partnership with local search company, Qihoo 360, to take on the dominant player, Baidu. With that in mind, it seems like a remarkable coincidence that it has now decided to throw in the towel and drop the notifications. The company's unofficial mantra – "don't be evil" – becomes more threadbare with ever year.

While it's arguable that notifying users when they were about to be censored was a small thing, it put Google on the right side of the fight for free expression. By ceasing to indicate when its results are interfered with by the Great Firewall, Google has made itself complicit in the process. The company's desire to maintain a foothold in the Chinese market outweighs its highfalutin' rhetoric on the openness of the web and freedom of speech. China's censors must be delighted that Google has silenced itself.

Declassify report on the 1948 Hyderabad massacre

S A Aiyer in The Times of India

The Gujarat election will revive charges that Narendra Modi killed a thousand Muslims in the 2002 Gujarat riots, with the BJP accusing Rajiv Gandhi of killing 3000 Sikhs in the 1984 Delhi riots. To get a sense of perspective, i did some research on communal riots in past decades. I was astounded to find that the greatest communal slaughter occurred under neither Modi nor Rajiv but Nehru. His takeover of Hyderabad in 1948 caused maybe 50,000-200,000 deaths. The Sunderlal report on this massacre has been kept an official secret for over 60 years. While other princes acceded to either India or Pakistan in 1947, the Nizam of Hyderabad aimed to remain independent. This was complicated by a Marxist uprising. The Nizam's Islamic militia, the Razakars, killed and raped many Hindus. This incensed Sardar Patel and Nehru, who ordered the Army into Hyderabad. The Army's swift victory led to revenge killings and rapes by Hindus on an unprecedented scale. 

Civil rights activist AG Noorani has cited Prof Cantwell Smith, a critic of Jinnah, in The Middle Eastern Journal, 1950. "The only careful report on what happened in this period was made a few months later by investigators - including a Congress Muslim and a sympathetic and admired Hindu (Professor Sunderlal)- commissioned by the Indian government. The report was submitted but has not been published; presumably it makes unpleasant reading. It is widely held that the figure mentioned therein for the number of Muslims massacred is 50,000. Other estimates by responsible observers run as high as 200,000."      A lower but still horrific estimate comes from UCLA Professor Perry Anderson. "When the Indian Army took over Hyderabad, massive Hindu pogroms against the Muslim population broke out, aided and abetted by its regulars. On learning something of them, the figurehead Muslim Congressman in Delhi, Maulana Azad, then minister of education, prevailed on Nehru to let a team investigate. It reported that at a conservative estimate between 27,000 and 40,000 Muslims had been slaughtered in the space of a few weeks after the Indian takeover. This was the largest single massacre in the history of the Indian Union, dwarfing the killings by the Pathan raiders en route to Srinagar which India has ever since used as the casus belli for its annexation of Kashmir.  

    
"Nehru, on proclaiming Indian victory in Hyderabad, had announced that 'not a single communal incident' marred the triumph. What action did he take on receiving the report? He suppressed it, and at Patel's urging cancelled the appointment of one of its authors as ambassador in the Middle East. No word about the pogroms, in which his own troops had taken eager part, could be allowed to leak out. Twenty years later, when news of the report finally surfaced, his daughter banned the publication of the document as injurious to national interests."

Perry Andersen is accused by some of anti-Indian bias. This cannot be said of author William Dalrymple. In The Age of Kali, Dalrymple says the Sunderlal report has been leaked and published abroad, and "estimates that as many as 200,000 Hyderabadi Muslims were slaughtered." 

Our textbooks and TV programmes show Sardar Patel and Nehru as demi-gods who created a unified India. The truth is more sordid. You will not find any mention of the Hyderabad massacre in our standard history books (just as Pakistani textbooks have deleted reference to the East Pakistan massacre of 1971). The air-brushing of Patel and Nehru is complete. My friends ask, why rake up the 1948 horrors now? You sound like an apologist for Modi's killings of 2002.

I can only say that the killings of 1948 cannot possibly justify the killings of 2002, or 1984, or any others. Modi has blood on his hands, whether or not he was directly culpable. But why pretend that others had spotlessly clean hands? There is a macabre logic in the praises Modi has recently heaped on Patel: the two were not entirely dissimilar. Nations need to acknowledge their past errors in order to avoid them in the future. Germany acknowledged the horrors of fascism and militarism, and this helped it build a new anti-war society focused on human rights.

Something is terribly wrong when Indian citizens are kept in dark about the biggest pogrom since Independence, even after foreign sources have lifted the lid. India's jihadi press is fully aware of the 1948 massacre, and projects its censorship as evidence of Hindu oppression   . This is not how a liberal democracy should function. India cannot become a truly unified nation on the basis of suppressed reports and sanitized textbooks. The Sunderlal report must be made public.