In Hindenburg fallout, serious questions cordoned off by the media’s noise

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 14, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/08/14/in-hindenburg-fallout-serious-questions-cordoned-off-by-the-medias-noise

The Modi government is lucky. The latest bombshell from Hindenburg Research landed in India a day after the budget session of parliament had concluded. Had it come a couple of days earlier, one can just imagine the scenes in both houses of parliament, given that the name “Adani”, mentioned by anyone in the opposition, is like a red rag for this government. 

It will be recalled that we first heard about US-based Hindenburg Research when it broke a major story in January 2023 about the Adani group of companies. It claimed that after two years of research it had evidence to show that “Indian conglomerate Adani Group has engaged in a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades”. The expose shook up the financial markets in India and it is estimated that the Adani Group lost $150 billion. 

In the weeks that followed these sensational revelations, in response to a petition, the Supreme Court asked the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to investigate the veracity of the accusations made in the Hindenburg report. More than a year later, the investigation has still not been completed despite the court setting a deadline for March 2024. 

It is against this background that the latest report by Hindenburg, made public on August 10 must be viewed. The group has raised serious questions about the current chairperson of SEBI, Madhabi Puri Buch, and suggested the possibility of a conflict of interest in relation to the ongoing investigation into the Adani affair. 

How has the Indian media covered this latest development?

The story is not straightforward. To independently verify the Hindenburg revelations would require media houses to invest time and money to investigate each accusation and ascertain whether there was any truth in them.

It is still early days and perhaps some media house will walk that distance.

However, so far, the English print media, including the business papers, have stuck to reporting the gist of the Hindenburg revelations. Some gave it prominence on the first day, that is August 11. Others buried the story on the inside pages. For instance, while Indian Express and Times of India, as well as Telegraph, ran the story prominently on their front pages, The Hindu and Hindustan Times buried it on an inside page.  

In subsequent days, Indian Express has been the most active in following the story, continuing to give it a prominent position on its front pages, and doing a detailed explainer.  Some of the business papers have also done explainers. These are essential for lay readers who would not understand the intricacies of the financial world. 

The SEBI chairperson, and her husband Dhaval Buch, who has also been named by Hindenburg, issued a detailed statement that was carried by all media. SEBIissued a statement clearing the chairperson. And the press also reported the government’s response which was that it had nothing more to add to SEBI’s statement. 

However, even as all these statements were reported without any questions being asked, a couple of newspapers did raise some tentative doubts. 

For instance, both Hindustan Times and Mint, which belong to the same group, suggested in their editorials that in the “public interest” perhaps the Adani matter should be “taken over by sleuths other than Sebi’s”. They did not, however, suggest that the chairperson should step down.

The Financial Express did just that. In its editorial on August 12, it wrote: “Given the latest round of serious allegations before, it will be in the interest of India’s financial markets, the regulator, and Buch herself that the Supreme Court sets up a separate panel to take over the investigations into the Adani fiasco. Till the panel report is out, the Sebi chairman should recuse herself from this case. Such an action will only enhance the reputation and integrity of the country’s capital markets.”

On August 14, The Hindu also called for the SEBI chairperson to step down in its editorial.

Much of the rest of the coverage consisted of what the media like to call the “slugfest” between the opposition, which is demanding a JPC inquiry and the resignation of the SEBI chairperson, and the BJP which suspects that the controversy has been deliberately created to undermine India’s image. The loquacious Ravi Shankar Prasad led the way by typically bringing in the BJP’s favourite whipping horse, American philanthropist George Soros.

The serious questions being asked, and the first tentative investigations, have appeared in independent media platforms. Sucheta Dalal, whose expose of the stock market scam in 1992 still stands out as one of the best investigative stories done by a business journalist, asks tough questions in this piece in Moneylife 

She asks, for instance: “SEBI’s response, issued late on a Sunday night, is particularly disappointing. It claims to address issues that ‘warrant an appropriate response.’ However, when serious allegations are made against the chairperson and the regulator itself, an ‘appropriate response’ cannot be anonymous. It should come from those in a position to speak for the regulator – which is either the board of directors or the finance ministry. Was there a board meeting? Who has assumed responsibility for statements made in the press release?”

These are questions that other media organisations should also have asked but did not. 

Both Scroll and Wire have done reports checking the veracity of some of the statements made by the SEBI chairperson in response to the Hindenburg report. So even if parliament is not in session, and the opposition is unable to maintain a head of steam on this controversy, questions about conflict of interest in SEBI, the veracity of the Hindenburg revelations last year and now, and the health of our regulatory agencies will continue to be asked. 

Moving away from financial markets that interest a small percentage of Indian citizens, there is other dirt that is waiting for the media to dig up, literally. And that is on the state of India’s major cities. 

In this rainy season, almost every major city is drowning, their drains or what passes off for a drainage system, unable to cope with excess rains. Our cities are neither “smart”, as the Modi government promised, nor anywhere near a “global” standard despite the fancy airports, that also leak, and so-called “world class” highways that become moonscapes of potholes after a heavy downpour. 

While we write about urban infrastructure above the ground, stories that are often just refurbished press releases, the media needs to take a closer look at what lies beneath the city. 

On July 27, after three young people drowned in a basement in Delhi, the question of drainage systems appeared on the horizon momentarily. These three were not doing anything risky. They were sitting in a studying room, in one of the many centres that prepare those trying for competitive exams to enter the civil service, or to get into engineering or medical colleges. When the skies opened, and the drains overflowed, the basement flooded and these three drowned. It was a tragedy that ought to be a wakeup call not just for city planners and administrators, but for the media. 

Unfortunately, civic reporting has been downgraded to stories on such disasters. What we need are “drain inspectors”, journalists who understand the crucial infrastructure needed to make cities liveable for all and to persist in asking questions and reporting before disaster strikes.  

There was a time in Mumbai, where the acronym BRIMSTOWAD, which stood for Brihanmumbai Storm Water Disposal System, appeared regularly in the city papers. We read stories about the city’s 100-year-old drainage system and the urgent need for investment to repair and add to it so that the perennial monsoon flooding was avoided. Such reporting has virtually vanished. 

In the meantime, most of our cities continue to depend on ancient drainage systems and see little to no investment in making this “world class” even as densities increase, open areas are paved to prevent the natural absorption of excess rain, and the roads are in permanent gridlock. 

What is worse, despite all the talk about becoming a developed country, almost every day there are sickening stories of men who are lowered to clean these drains manually and die as they inhale the noxious fumes trapped inside – stories like this one in Scroll. India must be one of the few countries in the world that aspires to conquer space but cannot invent machines to replace people for such hazardous but essential work. 

More ‘politics’, less meaning: In mainstream media’s ivory towers, an incomplete budget story

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on July 25, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/07/25/more-politics-less-meaning-in-mainstream-medias-ivory-towers-an-incomplete-budget-story

Once again, Sansad TV, giving live feeds from the ongoing budget session of parliament, trumps other television channels in providing engaging coverage. 

Although reports of the debate over the union budget appear in the next day’s newspapers, they do not capture the diversity of interventions in the house, often by first time MPs. And this time, with an invigorated opposition, there is a robustness to the debate compared to the last decade.

Yet, as media, we must ask whether we have settled into a predictable groove in covering the budget, albeit with entertaining graphics and learned commentary from experts and others. Are we making enough of an effort to reach out to large sections of the population for whom the entire exercise probably has little relevance?

In the 1980s, when I worked with the Delhi edition of a national daily, and before the advent of multiple private TV channels and social media, the vox popconsisted of the reporter stepping out and speaking to the chaiwala outside the office and the workers at the local dhaba frequented by many journalists who worked in newspaper offices located on that street.  

Clearly, this was not representative of what poor people thought, but at least an effort was made to go beyond industry big-wigs and economists to assess what the man – and it was always a man – on the street thought.

At a time of unaddressed unemployment, of economic distress, of the struggle of so many poor people in our cities and countryside to keep their heads above water, surely there is a need to know whether they even know about the budget, whether they care, and if they do know, whether they believe it will make any material difference to their lives.

Also, in a time when we are becoming aware that legacy media, that is print media, and even the mainstream TV channels are not the primary sources of news for a growing number of people, especially the young, it would be useful to know whether they care about the budget, whether they even know what the exercise is about, and whether they think it makes any difference to their lives.  

In the absence of such reporting, entertaining as are the interventions in parliament in the budget debate – and I might add the rather predictable behaviour of Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla who continues to find fault with interventions by the opposition – the story remains incomplete. The union budget is a political exercise, but it also has real life impacts on ordinary people. As media consumers, we need to know and understand what these are.

While the budget session will continue to dominate the news for some time, the understandable media focus on it has overshadowed one of the most important stories reported in the last fortnight.

On July 18, Indian Express carried a front page story about a man called Rahim Ali from Assam.  Rahim Ali fought a 12-year battle to contest the ruling of a Foreigners’ Tribunal in Assam that declared he was not an Indian. The family appealed to the Gauhati High Court but got no relief. Finally, on July 11, the Supreme Court, where the case was pending, declared that Rahim Ali was, in fact, an Indian and the tribunal was at fault for determining his legitimate claim to citizenship by focussing on minor discrepancies in the documents he had presented.

The heart-stopping moment, as you read the story, was to be told that Rahim Ali was already dead. He had died more than two years before the judgement, a broken man unable to face the consequences of the tribunal’s ruling.

As Indian Express wrote in an editorial the next day:

“Ali’s story, at once tragic and absurd, is symbolic of the promises not kept in the fundamental social contract between citizen and state, enshrined in the Constitution’s letter and spirit. Ali’s wife, Hajera Bibi, on learning of the Court’s verdict, told this newspaper: ‘What is the point now? The fear that he lived under, of being taken away, died with him. If they still wanted to call him a foreigner, what would they have done? Picked him up from his grave?’ The question, steeped in sadness and anger, is a reproach. It is also a call for accountability from an opaque and labyrinthine process that casts the onus of proving their innocence on the vulnerable.”

The Express editorial also quotes the shocking official figures released by the Assam government in February of the number of people declared non-citizens by 100 tribunals – 1,59,353 – and the cases that are still pending, 94,149. And it rightly asks: “How many of the 1,59,353 have been unfairly stripped of their citizenship like Rahim Ali? For how long, and by what justification, will the nearly 1 lakh people whose cases are pending live under the Sword of Damocles?” 

That “opaque and labyrinthine process” that the editorial speaks of has been at work for many years in Assam. It drew some media attention in the early years, but as with many stories that are part of a process, and not an event, it slipped off the radar. 

There are surely many more like Rahim Ali, who continue to struggle against an arbitrary system that randomly picks up people and demands that they prove their citizenship. On a visit to Assam in 2019, I met some of these people. All of them carried plastic bags full of documents, their faces creased with anxiety as they did not know how to convince the tribunal that they were legitimate citizens of this country and not “illegal”.

The Rahim Ali story ought to prompt a renewed media focus on the process of weeding out so-called “illegal immigrants” in Assam, an issue that continues to be raked up by the current BJP government in the state. For years, civil society groups working on the ground have been crying themselves hoarse trying to attract media, and political attention, to the ongoing injustice being played out in the state. But the attention is sporadic, not sustained.

For those interested in learning more about this issue, do listen to this in-depth interview with Aman Wadud, a young lawyer who has been pursuing these cases, by LiveLaw. He explains the extent to which this process of determining citizenship is unfair and penalises the poor in Assam. He suggests that the Rahim Ali judgement should be read widely to understand how an Indian citizen can be declared a non-citizen.