The Problems of Hindi News Journalism in India

A seminar of Hindi journalists in New Delhi in 1994 agreed that Hindi publications generally receive a step-motherly treatment from the managements. Another view of the Hindi newspaper contended that the proprietor...runs the establishment like he would a shop. The journalists are treated like mules and the subeditors like clerks . Poor conditions, little training and constant insecurity sensitive Hindi journalists even more acutely to the desires of their proprietors than journalists elsewhere. The proprietary families of the above three newspapers - and of Amar Ujala of Agra, Rajasthan Patrika of Jaipur and Rashtriya Sahara of Lucknow - all come from backgrounds that might be loosely described s 'merchant caste".

They are not Brahmins, Thakurs or Rajputs, though they are "forward castes", urban-based and with strong commercial traditions. "My father started the newspaper", said Narendra Mohan, editor of Dainik Jagran, "by selling the ornaments of my mother in 1930". The families are from the same background as many supporters of the Hindu-revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its predecessor, the Jana Sangh. Their newspapers are often regarded as lining up with the BJP. For example, Mulayam Singh Yadav, the.'backwardcaste' politician, twice chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and defense minister in the government of India (1996), had a feud with Amar Ujala and Dainik Jagran that went back at least to the first confrontation at Ayodhya in 1990.

Indeed, arguments about the role of the Hindi and English press in the 1980`s were complex. On one hand, critics of the expanding Hindi press have blamed it for having spread antagonism towards Muslims and helped thereby to provoke the rioting of the early 1990`s. On the other hand, some analysts have argued that the English-language press was little better in its standards of sobriety and honesty. The difference was that the Hindi press, expanding rapidly, brought the authority of print to large numbers of people to whom the experience may have been totally new. Would their re-actions have been greatly different from those of Robert Roberts' newly literates in Britain in the 1960`s. On Monday mornings class talk is apt to begin with - "From what I seen in the News of the World yesterday..."The literate has arrived! Arguments are rife trough students reading or misreading reports of the same event in different newspapers.

Like most new readers, they tend to believe that  what appears in the Press and in books must be true. Given the need of journalists and editors to please their proprietors- reflect their views, increase their circulations - rumor, or "unconfirmed news", as the Aj representative described it, published under titillating headlines was not surprising. Hindi journalism pushed at new frontiers. On a frontier, standards are still to be set, and conflict is inescapable. When Aj and Dainik Jagran battled for supremacy in Kanpur in 1987-88, "the various allegations include[d] looting newspaper, using criminals to create trouble, beating up hawkers, manhandling the editorial staff and even murder threats... Running a Hindi news paper was not like giving ad inner party.

The fact that roughness, crudity and lack of professionalism were often attributed to the Hindi press provided a grievance that united everyone from Hindi proprietors to Hindi journalists. Among them all, a sense prevailed that the Hindi press was a very poor relation of the English press. The poverty was exemplified in advertising rates, salaries and conditions. In a celebrated story, The Times of India Group sent correspondents from its English daily, The Times of India, and its Hindi daily, Navbharat Times along with Dainik Jagran, to cover an earthquake in Tehri Garhwali n the Himalayas north of New Delhi. The reporter from the English daily was sent by car; the reporter from the Hindi daily went by bus. The key factor lay in advertising rates. Even though Hindi dailies exceeded English in circulation, their advertising rates remained lower, and, even with lower rates, they did not attract the most lucrative advertisements - for expensive goods and the most desirable jobs. "Inadequate funding", wrote Mrinal Pande, "is the first signal to the language press of its inferiority". Though this began to change slowly in the 1990s, even Punijab Kesari, the largest of the Hindi dailies, still failed to get advertisements for important jobs - the "appointments vacant" section of English dailies.

Politicians, to be sure, began to recognize that the Hindi press provided an ever-widening conduit to vast numbers of voters. And editors like Narendra Mohan of Dainik Jagran and Ashwini Kumar of Punjab Kesari relished the recognition they and their newspapers began to receive even from prime ministers. But as long as big advertisers judged Hindi to be a poor vehicle by which to promote their products, Hindi newspaper people would often consider themselves Cinderella’s in a household still run by a wicked step-mother who read English.

The indicators of social change were on the side of Cinderella. Primary and secondary education pushed increasingly into corners of UP, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan where it had been infirm or scarcely known before and literacy in Hindi grew steadily and strongly. Impressionistic evidence was common. In 1992, visiting the mountainous Kumaon area north of Delhi after ten-years, a veteran English-language journalist was surprised to find a variety of Hindi dailies "Swith screaming headlines and pictures, written with neo-literates in mind". Previously, "the highly literate minority" read a few dated copies of Aj from Varanasi 700 kilometers away; now rival papers came fresh at dawn from publishing centers in nearby Meerut and Bareilly. "The regional Hindi dailies", one survey concluded, "are the newspapers of the future". What the future held was far less certain. The old literate classes decried the vulgarity of the Hindi dailies and the gullibility of their 'neo-literate' readers. No doubt there was much to deplore, just as Richard Hoggart had found much to deplore in the booming popular newspapers of post-war Britain.

But another British student of literacy in the 1960`s concluded that while many newly literate people turned to "the lowest in print as soon as they saw it", literacy nevertheless had "conferred the power to choose". In the Hindi areas of north India, where only 35 per cent of the total population was literate  in 1991, there are vast numbers of people who will become 'neo-literates' in the next generation. They present markets for newspaper proprietors, but they will be approached in circumstances totally different from anything previously seen in India. They will become literate at the same time that television - increasingly in their own language - inundates their localities. How competing newspaper proprietors adapt to television, or adapt television to their interests, remains to be seen. But problems of standards, expectations, ownership and control of information will be thrashed out in ways that will affect the entire Indian polity.