Ramachandra Guha: Ignored by the ‘national’ media, a disaster is unfolding in Great Nicobar

No term in Indian public discourse is as egregiously misleading as “national media”.

For the newspapers, magazines and TV channels that come under this rubric have a narrow, blinkered view of the nation they claim to represent. They see India from the National Capital Region, and often from the NCR alone. Their geographical proximity to power both seduces and satisfies them – hence the profusion of pontificatory pieces by cabinet ministers in the opinion pages of newspapers, and the reduction by television of the diversity and complexity of India into a shouting match among politicians of different parties.

Hence also the shrinkage of space in “national” newspapers, and the utter absence in “national” television, of detailed, ground-level investigations of life in different communities and in different parts of the country.

My scepticism about the “national media” has grown steadily over the years. It was validated recently by two excellent compilations of articles on an unfolding national scandal of rather large proportions, a scandal that will certainly never be the subject of a debate in a well-appointed television studio in the NCR.

The scandal I refer to is the planned devastation of the Great Nicobar Island, which I have been reading about in a special issue...

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