OPINION

The past week has been bad for Delhi Police. No, it has not been because of any particular spurt in crime graph but largely due to the spanking it has received from a trial court to the Supreme Court in their handling of the February 2020 Delhi riots.

 Last week a trial court in Delhi came down heavily on the Delhi Police for its probe into a 2020 riots case in North-East Delhi, saying that its failure to conduct a proper investigation will "torment" the sentinels of democracy when history will look back at the worst communal riots in the national capital since partition.

The court said that the case was solved merely by filing the charge sheet without any real effort to trace out the eye witnesses, real accused persons, and technical evidence. Furthermore, the court said that the probe lacked sensitivity and skillfulness.

Delivering the Independence Day address this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced opening the gates of the Sainik Schools in every state for girls. A few days later, the Supreme Court directed the opening of the gates of the much-admired National Defence Academy (NDA), which imparts graduate-level training, to young women.

Criticizing a Supreme Court order in public is not easy, so the veterans from the armed forces largely poured vitriol on the WhatsApp groups. Much of the criticism was not founded on any solid argument but for the ‘hurt pride’ of ceding turf to the other gender. One such criticism was that charity should begin at home and that there should be a greater number of women in judiciary too.

The point, though made in ignorance, is well-taken. There should be gender parity in all realms and women given a fair chance vis-à-vis men to be part of each of the four estates – Legislature, Executive, Judiciary and Media. Contrary to the general perception except for legislature, women are taking big strides in the realm of the other three.

The onset of economic liberalisation during the 1990s saw a major change in the Indian media too. The coming of computers, new printing technology, communication networks and easy import of news print heralded this major change.

Technology ensured newspapers expanded network with single edition papers converting to multiple editions with focus on the regional news and soft stories. Nobody understood this demand of the news market better than Chandan Mitra, who passed away in the early hours of this Thursday, after fighting a debilitating illness for about a year.

Mitra in his innings first as the executive editor of Hindustan Times for a few years and later as editor-owner of The Pioneer for several years encouraged the genre which is largely identified as civic journalism and feature writing. Print journalism till the coming of the 1990s had largely been identified with political stories but here was an editor who was pushing for a strong city page with a lot of impactful local news.

This writer was closely associated with him in two civic campaigns as leader of the city reporting unit. The first being against the erstwhile Delhi Vidyut Board (DVB) at the turn of the century against the huge power theft and ten years later against the building of Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) corridor.

He took decision to launch news campaigns only after having ascertained about the issue personally and then leaving it to the team to execute it. He withstood the pressure of the powerful as the reporters went about doing their job.

The return of Taliban in Kabul could well have its repercussions in Delhi, even outside the diplomatic circles. It’s not just about the usual “terror-attack” kind of stories or the “miserable lives” they are portrayed to be living in the colonies of Delhi.  The Kabuliwalas (those who belong to Kabul) have long been entrenched with trade links in the national Capital and other parts of the country.

The Kabuliwalas, however, have not always, as portrayed in Rabindranath Tagore’s short story, been involved in trading just dry-fruits and carpets. Tagore’s famous story was made into a film by Bimal Roy with the same title in 1961. Balraj Sahni playing the iconic Kabuliwala. The film’s songs, written by Prem Dhawan and Gulzar, put to music by Salil Choudhury and sung by Manna Dey, Mohammed Rafi and Hemant Kumar, were an icing on the cake.

However, those covering the crime beat in the national Capital would recall that between 1996-2001, when Taliban ruled Afghanistan except the Panjshir region, a different kind of trade had flourished courtesy the Kabuliwalas in Delhi. During the period huge quantities of chemical named 3.4-methylenedioxyphenyl-2-propanone would leave the warehouse of chemical merchants from Naya Bazar and Khari Baoli in the walled city for Amritsar.

During the early years of my career in journalism, some very sound lessons were given by the veterans then; the foremost being to question the government. The role of the fourth estate gets transformed into that of an adjunct of the government’s propaganda machinery if media gives up its ‘sense of enquiry’.

Last week the Delhi government went to town claiming it was going to bring world-class education to 30 government schools by tying up with an examination body based abroad. The advertisements were supplemented by equally big write-up lapping up the move, with none raising an eye brow.

First let’s find out about the examination body with which the Delhi government has tied up with -- International Baccalaureate (IB). The IB is a foundation under Swiss law which is in the business of selling its products and services to schools in a system similar to a franchise network. Schools buy products and services from the IB - assessments, publications, the right to use branding - and in turn schools act as distributors, reselling the products and services to families.