Only those who give themselves a past can be assured of a future, great philosophers from Plato onwards have told us. Those who wipe the slate clean (in Mao Zedong’s famous phrase) of the past mutilate the future in the gestation period itself. That is precisely why revolutions often produce monsters – Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot, in our era, for instance. The past lives in our labyrinthine depth. It has to be brought out in the open. That calls at once for remembrance and re-interpretation. That is what anniversaries are intended to achieve. That is what we in The Times of India are engaged in doing on the occasion for our 150th anniversary. The occasion is, of course, a cause for celebration and we are celebrating it with gusto. But essentially it is an occasion for remembrance and re-interpretation.
Remembrance is a creative act when it is accompanied reinterpretation. We create the future as we remember the past and reinterpret it. Memory, as the saying goes, is selective: it is so of necessity; nature’s purpose of sustaining mental health would be frustrated if it were not so. To try to remember without discrimination is to allow oneself to be overwhelmed. We are selective in our remembrance, though we are not hiding any aspect of our past either from ourselves or from you, dear reader. We are taking stock of it. It is part of our armoury for our march into the future. The armoury has, however, to be reorganized. To put it differently, if the past gives us our identity, we have to sharpen that identity in order to be able to move into the future with a renewed sense of purpose, direction and confidence.
Identity requires definition. Definition requires delimitation (selection). This is as true of institutions as it is of communities and civilizations. Like civilizations, institutions are not built. They accumulate with the passage of time. The Times of India has accumulated in the 150 years of its life. Unlike individuals, institutions do not decay with age. They change and renew themselves. In the case of a newspaper, every editor puts his stamp on it and in the process renews it. The renewal can be a pretty drastic affair which is not good for the institution’s identity and well-being. But a healthy organisation is able to take care of such disruptions. The Times of India has had its share of unpleasant breaks. But it has been able to digest them. Not for nothing do two elephants figure in our monogram. Elephants, as you know, have a long memory and they digest rather well.
We need hardly remind any educated Indian that The Times of India is as old as modem India. But it might be useful to identify two outstanding features of modernity which have shaped this newspaper. The rise of modern India in the early part of the last century was accompanied by the appearance, for the first time in our history, of a state which did not depend for its survival on the support of powerful elements in our society and could, therefore, act independently of them and their interests. And the rise of such a powerful state was in turn followed inevitably by the rise of concern that it be accountable. The state was, of course, dominated by the British, though it was not wholly a British enterprise at any stage. And to begin with, accountability was also sought to be enforced on the state mainly by the British, through their associations and newspapers in India and through their Parliament in Britain. The Times of India was part of the effort by non-official British citizens to help consolidate the state and to enforce accountability on it.
The two concerns defined broadly the parameters for determining the policy of the paper. Independence in 1947, preceded by the transfer of ownership into Indian hands and followed by the transition to Indian editorship and management, could not have changed the established parameters. If anything, India needed a stronger state, faced as it was with the task of overcoming the havoc wrought by partition immediately and economic backwardness thereafter; simultaneously, steps needed to be taken to ensure that the state not only shed its colonial attitude towards the common man but also functioned in a manner appropriate to democracy.
The clash between the two requirements is obvious. But the two are not contradictory. They constitute a dialectical process which is visible in every mature democracy. It is not recognised sufficiently well that the individual s rights and liberties are best safeguarded by a strong state capable of rising above partisan interests and clamour of the mob, especially in a country such as ours which is riddled with social and religious conflicts. On the other side of the fence, the advocates of a strong state often fail to recognise that only a state sensitive to popular aspirations and respectful of democratic rights can be a strong state in the long run. The fate of one dictatorship after another should have clinched the issue but it has not. As we in The Times of India have seen things in the last four decades, there can be no escape either from the dialectical process or the need to shift, from time to time, the emphasis from the protection of the state to liberty and vice versa, depending on our appreciation of the situation. Changes of editorship have not affected this broad perspective. Or at least so we believe.
As it happens, India has witnessed a number of mass convulsions in the last two decades. These have, by definition, involved arousal of intense feelings, especially among the urban intelligentsia, so much so that all elections to the Lok Sabha since 1967 have been in the nature of referendums on the incumbent Prime Minister. More often than not, the dominant sentiment among the articulate western-educated intelligentsia has been against the Congress which has continued to rule at the Centre except for the brief 1977-79 Janata interregnum. More than liberty and bread, corruption in public life has often been the dominant issue since 1973. In such a situation, it is both natural and tempting to be on the side of the “angels.” It is painless to flow with the current. But invariably we have resisted this tendency and temptation. We have more often than not chosen to go against the current. This has not been the result of either some hidden perversity or of the desire on our part to please those in authority, if only because they have been lacking in the substance of authority. No, we have not been wanting to be the devil’s advocates. We have felt that even if the state was not in serious peril as a result of the discrediting of the Prime Minister and the government, the balance needed to be redressed. The libertarians are by nature more inclined to take the country’s security for granted than the conservatives even if the problem of external security gets linked up with that of law and order at home, as it has been in India since 1947 in the north-east and since 1982 in Punjab. As noted earlier, the two must interact to produce the necessary balance. We have fulfilled our part of the bargain (unbargained for). We sincerely believe that by doing so we have served the county well.