From Vantara to forest reserves, photo ops trump journalism

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on March 13, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/03/13/from-vantara-to-forest-reserves-photo-ops-trump-journalism

Compared to the Trump Tsunami that has the US president literally flooding the media with new and almost always controversial statements every day, our leaders and their politics appear almost dull. 

Even as he announced drastic job cuts in his country and the stock market went into a deep dive, Donald Trump found the time to promote his close friend and confidante Elon Musk’s electric car, Tesla, on the lawns of the White House. The concept of conflict of interest clearly does not exist in the era of Trump that we have now entered. There may be a few parallels in India.

Meanwhile, in India, the stock markets have been volatile. And there are other raging controversies, such as on the language issue and delimitation. But our prime minister seemed unperturbed as he spent a day endorsing the efforts of Anant Ambani, son of Mukesh Ambani, in setting up an animal rescue facility and what some may call a private zoo – Vantara in Jamnagar. 

Modi posed, stroking a lion who was safely ensconced in a glass cage. He was also photographed feeding tiger cubs. And all this promotional material was amplified without a question by mainstream media. There were no queries about the facility, how many animals it had, from where these animals had been brought, at what price, and whether the environment in which they were caged was suitable for them.

One newspaper did raise some questions shortly after Modi’s visit to Vantara. The Telegraph ran a story quoting a report by the Wildlife Protection Forum of South Africa (WAPFSA) which raised some uncomfortable questions about Vantara. Strangely, that story has now been taken down. And the PDF of that report as well as the statement by WAPFSA has also disappeared from its website.

But before that happened, it was mentioned in reports in Down to Earth and in Scroll, amongst other independent portals. 

The PDF of the WAPFSA report, which this columnist accessed before it disappeared, pointed out that Vantara had purchased wild animals from South Africa, some of which were endangered.  

It stated: “According to published articles, between 2019 and present day, the Radhe Krishna Temple Elephant Welfare Trust and the GZRRC have amassed what is described as an extraordinary assemblage of wildlife, including multiple endangered species. GZRRC started, according to the exact terminology of a published article, with an opening ‘stock’ of 1873 animals and during one year 2022 – 2023 acquired a further 1946 animals.” 

GZRCC stands for Greens Zoological Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre, an affiliate of Vantara.

The Down to Earth story also mentions the animals in captivity at Vantara and quotes WAPFSA: “Most wildlife experts agree that placing animals in any captive environment is itself a form of mistreatment. A life in captivity in a zoo, no matter how advanced the zoo facilities may be, can never equal a life lived in natural surroundings. Captivity enforces conditions upon wild animals in which they are not adapted to thrive.” 

Earlier in the year, Deccan Herald carried a story reporting that activists in Assam were worried about the way 21 captive elephants had been transported from Arunachal Pradesh to Jamnagar for the Vantara facility.

But these are exceptions. No questions asked or raised, no effort to get the back story. That now is the dominant norm in most of mainstream media when it comes to anything endorsed by the prime minister or the government.

For instance, after Vantara, Modi visited the 58th tiger reserve in Madhya Pradesh. An obvious question that any self-respecting media organisation should have asked is: how are the other 57 doing?

Tiger sanctuaries were enthusiastically promoted in the 1970s when Indira Gandhi was the prime minister. Project Tiger was hardly ever questioned except by a few journalists and activists. Anil Agarwal, the pioneering environmental journalist who set up the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), wrote this in “The State of India’s Environment 1982: A Citizens’ Report” about Project Tiger: “Project Tiger is a spectacular landmark in our efforts at wildlife conservation. A serious flaw in this approach, however, is highlighted by the situation in the Periyar Tiger Reserve. Here, several tribal villages were shifted out of the core zone. Dispossessed of their habitat, the tribals soon lost the little land they were given as compensation, and became pauperised. At the same time, the authorities did not remove four cardamom estates in the heart of the core zone”.

Since then, the rights of forest dwellers have found support, and the Forest Rights Act was passed in 2006. The law is not perfect but at least it recognises that forests are not just for animals but also for the people who have always lived there. However, as with so many reasonably good laws in this country, it is observed in the breach. Unless people protest, no one pays heed to such rights, particularly when the people involved are at the bottom of the economic pyramid. 

And of course, only if people come out in substantial numbers on the streets does the media pay any heed to what they are saying.

Agarwal’s observations of the Periyar Tiger Reserve are echoed even today in other tiger reserves. Take this story by The Hindu’s Odisha correspondent Satyasundar Barik on tiger sanctuaries in the state. He points out that not only were the Adivasis forced to relocate but that out of four tiger sanctuaries in the state, one has no tigers and yet vast lands have been emptied out for it.

And this story in Down to Earth points out that even today, literally thousands of Adivasis are being evicted from lands they have occupied for generations by the process of creating inviolate spaces for tigers and other wildlife.  

“These evictions are affecting nearly 400,000 Adivasis, who are now fighting to defend their homes and heritage. Protests have erupted in major tiger reserves such as Nagarhole, Kaziranga, Udanti-Sitanadi, Rajaji, and Indravati. Demonstrators are calling for an immediate halt to what they describe as illegal actions by the government.”

You will not know any of this if you only follow mainstream media. Of course, there was a time when newspapers devoted space to environmental stories, even those that made the government or corporations uncomfortable. But that is in the past. In today’s media reality, the only environment that interests the mainstream is what happens in big cities. So, air quality, and sometimes water quality, will feature as environmental stories.

Meanwhile in the rest of the country, not only are thousands of Adivasis being displaced, but rivers are being poisoned, glaciers are melting, land degradation is evident, and the mad pace of infrastructure construction everywhere is turning cities, and even small towns into dust bowls.

US tariffs, impact on economy: USAID row helps bury the big questions

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on February 28, 2025

Link:  https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/02/28/us-tariffs-impact-on-economy-usaid-row-helps-bury-the-big-questions

Can the media avoid falling for the politics of distraction? Apparently not, as far as the media in India is concerned.

There is no better illustration of this than the recent controversy over an apparent US $21 million that USAID is supposed to have given to an organisation based in Washington DC to fund “voter turnout” in India.  This came up because US President Donald Trump has gone on something of a warpath against USAID, claiming it was wasting his country’s funds by giving money to countries for projects that were unsupportable.

If this was the case, then there was no story there. But the decision to cancel USAID for projects overseas took a turn in India that could have been considered funny if it wasn’t so pathetic.

Within days of Trump’s announcement about cancelling the $21 million for India, the blame game was in full swing. The BJP’s Information and Technology Cell head Amit Malviya called the Congress party “desperate” and accused it of routing the USAID fund through “various George Soros-linked fronts and a labyrinth of NGO structures to meddle with India’s electoral process”. Congress spokesperson Jairam Ramesh responded by pointing out that “USAID is currently implementing seven projects in collaboration with the government of India, with a combined budget of approximately $750 million. Not a single of these projects has to do with voter turnout. All of them are with and through the Union government.”

To add masala to this “unhinged public discourse”, as The Hindu termed it in its editorial, the originator of the controversy, Donald Trump himself, added to the confusion by first reiterating that the funds had been given because “I guess they were trying to get somebody else elected.” And then claiming the funds were going “to my friend Prime Minister Modi in India for voter turnout”, and then arbitrarily reducing the amount from $21 million to $18 million.

Meanwhile, the Indian media, especially television news that loves a good controversy, parroted all this without as much as a raised eyebrow. 

Fortunately, we still have some print media organisations that do what any journalistic endeavour should do: investigate and find out facts.

The Indian Express led with a front-page story that established that the magical figure of $21 million was the exact same as what USAID had given to organisations in Bangladesh in the run-up to the 2024 general elections. And the USAID website had no record of a similar amount going to India. So, did Trump get mixed up between Dhaka and Delhi? Or was this part of a deliberate strategy to stir up a controversy?

The controversy ought to have been settled after the Indian Express story. Subsequently more “facts”, rather than rhetoric, appeared in the print media when official government documents established that in the last four years, the government has received $650 million for a variety of projects as outlined by the fact-check site Boom. And that over the years, irrespective of the government in power, USAID has been funding official government projects in India – including healthcare, education and sanitation – as illustrated by this graphic in Times of India. 

Times of India

In addition to this, it is entirely possible that some non-governmental organisations received funds from foundations or non-profits in the US that were partly funded by USAID.  Even if some did, we still need to establish if any of them were even remotely involved in something as political as enhancing “voter turnout”. Given that the Modi government has cancelled the FCRA (Foreign Contributions Regulation Act) licenses of thousands of NGOs, it is unlikely that any of those considered even remotely political would have survived the axe.

Apart from finding out the facts and reporting them, rather than routinely repeating accusations by politicians on both sides, what really needs to be investigated is why the BJP trumped this up as a major controversy for which predictably, both the opposition and mainstream media fell. And who gains from it.

This politics of distraction is now a well-known ploy. As Ravish Kumar points out in one of his recent programmes, while we were discussing many non-issues, the country’s stock markets were falling and no one was asking the government why this was happening. While the governments of Assam and Madhya Pradesh were hosting “global” investment meetings, there was hardly any discussion about the consequences of Trump’s threat that he would charge India the same tariffs as India charged for US imports. How would this affect the Indian economy and foreign investment? Did the Modi government have a strategy to handle the consequences of raised tariffs? These questions were left hanging in the air.

And as suddenly as it popped up, the USAID controversy has disappeared. The government has not confirmed or denied this mythical sum of $21 million for “voter turnout” despite making statements that it was concerned and was looking into it. And the Indian media has dropped the subject. 

Also, now that the Maha Kumbh has ended, even the controversy about the quality of the water in the Ganges in which millions of people took a dip, generated by the report of the Central Pollution Control Board, will not be discussed anymore even though the state of India’s rivers ought to be an urgent concern for everyone, irrespective of their religious significance.

To end, I leave you with this article by Shailendra Yashwant in Deccan Herald on the state of the Yamuna, one of the three rivers that form part of the Sangam in Prayagraj. It reminds us of the crisis our rivers face as they continue to be blocked by dams and barrages, slowing down their natural flow, and then treated as sewers along the way by every town and city on their banks until their waters are not only unfit for drinking but even for bathing.