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. 

Bengaluru, Pak floods coverage exposes gaps in media’s understanding of climate, development issues

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 8, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/09/08/bengaluru-pak-floods-coverage-exposes-gaps-in-medias-understanding-of-climate-development-issues

In this season of floods, some floods matter more than others. You can see this in the amount of time and space the media accords to some floods, while virtually ignoring others.

Then we have the entrenched politics of water and land, as well as factors that transcend state and national boundaries such as climate change. We in the media should be addressing these politics and the reality of climate change, while covering the current spate of floods in the region which cannot be categorised simply as “natural disasters”.

The floods that matter, and which we report in detail, are those in the big cities. This entails minimum costs for media houses as the crisis is literally on their doorsteps. Those affected are also part of the “market” of these media houses. Floods further afield, in the northeast for instance, do not engage mainstream media in India to this extent.

The coverage of the recent flooding of large parts of Bengaluru, which undoubtedly was big news given the city’s global connections, exposed another aspect of the coverage of floods. While the visuals of upscale villas in gated communities and floating high-end automobiles might make for dramatic footage, we saw little of the devastation caused to the urban poor parked just outside the gates of these colonies.

Also, you had to look hard to find reportage explaining the backstory of why Bengaluru is in such a mess. In fact, such a disaster has been predicted for long by environmentalists and urban planners. They have exposed and campaigned against the destruction of natural lakes around the city, the construction on lake beds and misplaced urban development plans that cater to the demands of private developers. This, and an inadequate drainage system, has had a direct impact on Bengaluru’s ability to cope with excessive rainfall.

The Bengaluru flooding story has been seen in practically every major metro in India, and even in smaller cities and towns. This is decidedly not a “natural” disaster. It is the consequence of how the politics of land, inextricably linked to city and state politics, plays out. Urban development plans are made, only to be ignored. And environmental concerns go unheeded despite the campaigning of determined civil society groups. Practically no political party makes these concerns a part of its agenda. Profits, not prudence, is the mantra all of them follow.

For the media, these recent floods in Bengaluru underline not only the abysmal lack of planning and development in that city, but the gap in the media’s understanding of the larger issues behind this disaster.

For one, understanding the consequences of land use, and the politics behind it, as well as how natural resources such as water are used, or abused, needs to be the foundation for city reporting. Journalists given this beat must understand this politics to be able to report incisively not just on events, like floods, but also on why they occur.

Second, reporters need to understand that the worse-affected in these “unnatural” disasters are those with the least clout in how decisions are made in city development. So, in Bengaluru too, several urban poor communities lost everything they possessed in the floods. Once the waters recede, and there is talk of compensation, the well-heeled will recover from insurance claims. The poor will be left with nothing, especially as in many instances they either do not possess, or have lost, the documentation to establish that they are “legal”.

As urban planner and civil engineer Vishwanath S explains in this interview to Scroll:

“There are a lot of informal areas around the Information Technology hub that have been affected. These areas are not being documented or being shown. They may or may not be legal slums, which is more concerning as that means there is a good chance they would not even have the inadequate drainage systems in place. Then there is the periphery of the state which is being affected, which is not being documented and shown either. The focus has been on the apartments worth Rs 9 crore or Rs 13 crore or the villas which have been flooded.”

Equally important, journalists reporting on cities must comprehend how climate change is affecting our cities in a very direct way, not just by way of extreme weather events. It will help reporters dig deeper to understand the backstory, so that readers or viewers develop a better understanding of why such disasters are occurring so frequently.

Moving on from Bengaluru, the much bigger crisis is what has occurred in what we love to refer to as our “neighbouring country”, that is Pakistan. The scale of the devastation is hard to imagine. The visuals seen on international TV channels, and on social media, are frightening. Just visualising one third of a country under water is tough. Yet that is the reality in Pakistan today.

Although there has been some coverage of the devastation next door in the Indian media, it is not enough. The reason it needs to be much more detailed is obvious. India has not just a shared history with Pakistan, but also a shared geography. As the current director of Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission, Farah Zia points out in this perceptive article in Indian Express: “We’re in it together. ‘We’, as in India and Pakistan. Our weather systems like our history are joined at the hip.”

What is also interesting is how, as in India, in Pakistan too, the media ignored the early warning signs of the floods, because they occurred as early as July in Balochistan which, as Farah Zia writes,“… is not on the media’s radar anyway. It only got attention when an army helicopter on a flood relief and rescue mission, with high-profile personnel on board, crashed on August 2. The province also got the media’s attention once the death toll crossed 100.”

Historian Ammar Ali makes a similar point when he writes in this article in Jacobin that Islamabad-based political commentators were preoccupied writing about politics even as the first information about the devastation was coming through on social media. “Soon, floods began overwhelming areas in Sindh and south Punjab. The first time floods became the main headline on a Pakistani channel was August 23. By this time, more than twenty million people had already been affected, making it the worst natural disaster in the country’s recent history,” he writes.

Maleeha Lodhi, a former journalist who was also a top diplomat, reiterates that while politicians were more concerned about their political agendas, it is Pakistani civil society that stepped in to help. “The exemplary role of the public should be matched by a display of solidarity among political leaders and parties. But this continues to be in short supply”, she writes in this article that first appeared in Dawn.

Ali makes another observation that I think is relevant for us in the media in India.

“The media’s delayed response to the climate catastrophe is partly explained by the fact that the narrative around ‘natural disasters’ does not easily offer a neat categorization of heroes and villains. This turns them into a tragedy that can invoke global pity but is unable to generate political contestation. Yet, politics really is at the heart of the tragedy today unfolding in Pakistan. It is thus imperative to nominate the villains responsible for the needless suffering of millions of people.”

If you noticed, the political blame game has already begun in Bengaluru. It happens all the time when such disasters take place. Yet the real “villains”, which would include all political parties and those who benefit from political power, and the way both flout long-term plans for short-term gains, are rarely identified. That is the role that only an independent media can play, an increasingly endangered species in both India and Pakistan.

In Pa Ranjith’s ‘Kaala’, a glimpse of what Dharavi truly is – and what it could have been

The Rajinikanth starrer engages with many of the real issues facing the Mumbai neighbourhood, says the author of a book on Dharavi. 

 

Published in Scroll.in --  https://scroll.in/reel/883055/in-pa-ranjiths-kaala-a-glimpse-of-what-dharavi-truly-is-and-what-it-could-have-been

“Yeh Dharavi toh jophadpatti ki rani hai” (This Dharavi is the queen of slums). This is what a woman who lived on the pavement opposite Jhoola maidan in Byculla told me in the mid-1980s when I spoke to her. Today, she has been moved out of her house to a distant suburb, but the “queen” of Mumbai’s slums now has a “king”, by way of Rajinikanth in the recently released Pa Ranjith film Kaala.

I must admit first that I have never seen a Rajnikanth film. My loss, I am told. But I did watch Kaala, mostly because it is set in Dharavi (the Hindi dubbed version, although I would have preferred the original Tamil version with sub-titles to get the full flavour).

Although the director has taken cinematic licence in telling the story of Dharavi’s redevelopment through two main characters, he has managed to engage with many of the real issues that people living in this place that is wrongly called a “slum” face every day of their lives.

Dharavi is, as one of the characters in the film says, a mini-India, something I was told repeatedly by the people I interviewed for my book Rediscovering Dharavi (Penguin, 2000). Ranjith brings this out without making a big point about it. You can see the mix of communities although the film is centered on the Tamil Dalit community, the Adi Dravidas who came to work in the tanneries that dotted Dharavi till the mid-1980s. In fact, a fleeting shot in the film shows a wooden barrel that was used in small tanneries that continued to function till the end of the ’90s, even after the big ones had been compelled to relocate because of pollution control laws.

Ranjith’s film also establishes that Muslims, Hindus, Dalits and other castes have coexisted in Dharavi and that the clashes that took place at various times were often because of external provocation. The scene where a piece of pork is flung into a mosque and ultimately results in a clash between Hindus and Muslims is an illustration of this. On December 6, 1992, the Shiv Sainiks took out a cycle rally through Dharavi celebrating the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. This was the provocation for the communal rioting that followed even though Muslims and Hindus had lived together with a high level of tolerance till then. There were provocations and minor skirmishes before this but not on the scale of 1992-93.

Above all, Ranjith has underlined the fact that Dharavi is predominantly a settlement of Dalits. Although the film centres on the Tamils, in fact there are Dalits from Haryana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka and probably elsewhere. Dharavi is a reserved Scheduled Caste constituency. At a time of growing Dalit assertion, this reality is often forgotten. Ranjith reminds us in different ways of this without making it the main theme of the film.

Ranjith also reminds us that Dharavi was literally “made” by the people who live there. Therefore, the repeated assertion by Rajnikanth’s character that Dharavi belongs to them. It was a swamp, a place where there could be no human settlement. Yet over time, the very people who came to live there filled it up. The side of present-day Dharavi touching Sion and the one next to Mahim were separated by that swamp. Today, you would not be able to tell.

This is part of Dharavi’s history, one that is often overlooked. The value that people have added to this land has never been recognised by those who view it as prime real estate, a realisation that first dawned in the mid-’80s when Bandra and Kurla were being developed into one business district. Dharavi lies just across the Mithi river from Bandra and Kurla; hence its importance.

It is, as people in the film state, located virtually in the centre of Greater Mumbai, although it once was the periphery. That is another reason why the eyes of the real estate developers light up when they think of the value of the land where Dharavi is located.
What makes Kaala stand out is also that it has not resorted to making some kind of generic slum and passing it off as Dharavi. Although Danny Boyle did not say that Slumdog Millionaire (2008) was about Dharavi, a lot of people presumed it was. Yet, anyone who knows Dharavi, and lives in the Mumbai where informal settlements are an integral part of the city, would have recognised the mixed shots from different “slums” that were used to create one generic urban poor settlement in that film.
Ranjith does not do this. Barring a couple of shots that were clearly not of Dharavi, he tries to stay true to the place.

I came out of the film thinking, “I wish, I wish.” I wish that the urban poor were united enough to fight against those trying to oust them from the land they built. I wish that greed, corruption and politics did not divide them so that they end up working against their own best interests. I wish journalists could play the role the sole journalist plays in the film of exposing the nexus between the police, politicians and builders. I wish the Dharavi story could have held up an example for other urban poor settlements across India.

The reality, sadly, is different. The residents of Dharavi are divided along political lines. They have different demands, and follow those most likely to fulfill what they want.

Also, it is interesting that Kaala is about Dharavi’s redevelopment. Ironically Dharavi’s identity is linked to the plan to “redevelop” it. Since 2004, when the Dharavi Redevelopment Plan was mooted, people living there have identified with the place in a much more immediate way. In 1999, when I spent time in Dharavi to interview people for my book, I found many of the older people identified either with the village or district from where they or their forefathers had come, or with the specific area where they lived.
So it would be Kumbharwada, or Kamraj Nagar, or Ganesh Mandir, or Muslim Nagar, or Matunga Labour Camp. Or Tirunelvelli, Jaunpur, Junagadh. This sense of Dharavi as a specific settlement with its own identity was not evident.

In fact, I recall a conversation with an elderly man in the Matunga Labour Camp who was a Valmiki from Haryana. When I asked a question about Dharavi, he interrupted and asked me, “What is this Dharavi you are talking about?”

Yet already by then, the younger people expressed themselves as being from Dharavi. So the identity of Dharavi had begun to emerge, but I would argue that it was consolidated once the state saw it as a piece of real estate to be developed under the Dharavi Redevelopment Plan.

Coming back to the idea of a “King” of the “Queen” of slums, for a film with a superstar like Rajinikanth, that works. But once again, the reality is somewhat different. In the ’80s, Dharavi did see gang warfare in the heyday of Varadarajan Mudaliar (on whom Mani Ratnam’s Nayakan, with Kamal Hasan, was based). But much of that kind of dramatic clash of opposing gangs ended once prohibition ended, and Mudaliar was chased out of Maharashtra.

That is not to say that they are no slumlords, or local strongmen, with their respective gangs. They do exist, as they do in any such settlement. But the kind of violence depicted in the film is a part of history, and not daily existence in Dharavi.

Builders and their political backers have several other ways to intimidate and coerce Dharavi’s residents to sign on the dotted line for redevelopment. But that too has been frozen ever since the entire area was designated a special zone for development under the Dharavi Redevelopment Plan. There are no more buildings coming up under the Slum Redevelopment Scheme that applies to the rest of Mumbai.

Dharavi in fact is caught in a limbo – between the Maharashtra government’s grand designs of converting it into a high-end residential and business enclave and the reality of lakhs of people continuing to live in sub-optimal conditions and hoping for a change. The Slum Redevelopment Scheme cannot be implemented there and the redevelopment plan is a dead horse that the government continues to flog, its latest effort being the attempt to bring in some interested parties from Dubai.

Meanwhile, the people of Dharavi live in a schizophrenic world where there are some high-rise buildings, mostly adjacent to main roads, while the interiors remain virtually as they were for the last two decades. And the city around them continues to develop and “redevelop”.

 

Death by design

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, April 14, 2013

 

APA collapse of faith?

TOPICS

Maharashtra

Mumbai

construction and property

heavy construction

real estate

apartments

The Mumbra building collapse highlights the ugly reality behind lofty promises of world-class housing.

On Thursday April 4, the earth shook. Not because there was an earthquake. It trembled when the deadly mix of sand pretending to be cement brought down a seven-storey building in Mumbra, north of Mumbai, like “a pack of cards”. This was not an accident: it was death by design.

The murky stories of collusion between municipal officials, the local police and the builders are now surfacing. For a few lakhs, even a few thousand rupees, these officials looked the other way while the merchants of death went about building something that was destined to collapse. There was illegality written into every word of the script — from the land deal to the building permissions to even the electricity connection. What levels of cynicism and heartlessness must it require for people to actually construct a building, entice poor and desperate people to occupy it while construction continues, and then watch it collapse on top of these unwary residents?

The 75 men, women and children who died and the over 60 injured committed no crime. Their only fault was to believe that a “pucca” house is any structure built of brick and cement. And if it is multi-storied, it must be even stronger. For unlike their temporary structures in the slums, they presumed that such construction must require some engineering expertise.

It is too late for many of them to realise how wrong they were. There are heartrending stories of workers who brought their families from their villages because finally, they could “afford” a house. An entire family from Nepal has been wiped out, leaving only a 10-year-old boy and the grandparents who are still in Nepal. Infants have been orphaned; families are left without their main breadwinner. Every story is the same. They heard they could rent a place cheap and moved in.

The ripples from the collapse of this one building will be felt much farther than its immediate neighbourhood. One of the most disturbing aspects is the extent of illegality. When you have the Chief Minister of the state acknowledging that nine out of 10 buildings in the area were illegal, you know that this is not the story of one building falling down. How can there be such a state of affairs without rampant collusion at every level? If the CM had said 10 per cent — or even 20 per cent — of the buildings were illegal, one could have accepted that the authorities were making an effort to check illegality but some just slipped through the cracks. But 90 per cent?

While the illegality is excavated, what does this collapse say about the desperation for housing in a city like Mumbai where the majority can only dream of an affordable house in their lifetime while a minority is spoilt for choice? It suggests that if you chance on a house you think is affordable, it is likely to become a nightmare before long. It is within your price range only because corners have been cut at every step of the way. In other words, if you are poor, you will find “affordable” if you are willing to accept “illegal”.

Try and imagine what a poor family, living for generations in one of Mumbai’s many slums, would feel right now. For the women, in particular, the dream of a ‘pucca’ house carries with it the hope of some dignity because of a toilet in the house, and a reduction in the daily drudgery of collecting scarce water. Although life in the seven-storey structures built as part of the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme is far from perfect, no woman will refuse to take the keys to a flat in one of these structures. But these are the women whose families are considered “eligible” depending on their ability to prove that they have lived in that particular slum before the government-ordained “cut-off” date.

What of those who not eligible, or who came to the city in the last 10 years, or who lived in one of the many old, dilapidated buildings that are on the verge of collapse? These are the people who hunt for rental housing and often the only choice for them is buildings like the one that collapsed. Some might not collapse. But they are falling apart within months of completion. And if you are one of these people who thought you had got a bargain, you count your blessings that you have a roof over your head and pray that it will not come down on you one day.

This then is the true picture of housing not just in Mumbai but in all our cities. It is not what you can easily be deluded to believe — the story of the “world-class” housing advertised in pretty pictures on the front pages of practically every newspaper and on large hoardings. It is the ugly reality represented by the horrifying images of the building collapse in Mumbra. Cheap, dangerous, illegal constructions are spawning everywhere, with the blessings of the people in power. Everyone is making money — while the poor are literally getting crushed.

(To read the original, click here.)