Muslim Policemen in Gujarat story - ToI could have wrong data

A couple of days back, I found a Times of India story circulating in Facebook. The story is here:
Gujarat Tops States in number of Muslim policemen.
The story says that ToI filed a RTI inquiry to the Union Home Ministry for the number of Muslim policemen in all states and their percentage as part of the total police force in each state. When they got back the numbers, they found that Gujarat actually had the best stats among all the states for which data was available.
Gujarat, according to ToI, had 47,424 policemen in total. of them 5021 were Muslims.
This story did not pass the smell test for me.
In the past few years, Narendra Modi, CM of Gujarat, has become a controversial figure. He was CM during the 2002 Gujarat riots. Then he reinvented himself as a "growth" leader. A vocal set of supporters cheer him on (such as during the Nano deal). Some journalists have responded by showing that the Gujarat "story" is not without flaws. They cite some numbers, the other side cites some numbers and it is all confusing.
The above article's focus on Muslim policemen in a police force seemed unusual to focus on. I have a hunch that Muslims are severely underrepresented in the police force (as in many other jobs) all through India. I can understand that in different states the percentage will be different. But, Gujarat was the best in representation? Not even second or third? The very state that people were arguing over? It seemed unlikely to me. So, I did some investigation of these numbers.
First, the number of Muslim policemen and the number of total policemen in each state is available in the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). This is a government website. If you click on Crime 2011 in the left hand bar in that website, choose Tables and Go to the Table 17.12, you will find the breakdown of Muslim, SC, ST policemen in each state in India as of 2010.
When people quote crime statistics in India, they use the NCRB data. They supply raw data that you can analyze yourself.
In other words, Times of India need not have filed an RTI query at all. The information was at a Google search away, in a government website.

Now, take a look at the numbers for Gujarat and you will immediately see that they are different from the Times numbers.
                                                     NCRB                                       ToI
Number of Total policemen          71670                                       47424
Number of Muslim policemen      3087                                         5021
The NCRB shows a 4.3% representation in Gujarat, a lot different from the 10% they have from ToI data.
Now, I used the NCRB data and tried to see for a few states, how Gujarat held up to "the best representation. The numbers are below:

State	Population(2001)	Muslim Population(2001)	Percent in General	Size of Policeforce	Muslims in Policeforce	Muslim Percent in Police	Difference(%)
Tamil Nadu	62405679	3470647	5.56	95745	3061	3.19	-2.3
Andhra Pradesh	76210007	6986856	9.16	89404	8933	9.99	0.82
Madhya Pradesh	60348123	3841449	6.36	72505	2583	3.56	-2.80
Gujarat	50671017	4592854	9.04	71670	3087	4.30	-4.75
Haryana	21144564	1222916	5.78	50365	415	0.82	-4.95
Kerala	31841374	7863842	24.69	45003	3567	7.92	-16.7
Karnataka	52850562	6463127	12.22	74699	4796	6.42	-5.80

In other words, Gujarat is not on top, but not on bottom either. It is certainly not the best state for Muslim representation in police force; nor does that representation EXCEED the population percentage of Muslims. Tamil Nadu, Andhra and Madhya Pradesh are better and Haryana is about the same as Gujarat.
It is possible that the NCRB numbers are wrong, and the ToI numbers are right, but I doubt it. The total numbers correspond with other data such as density of policemen in the NCRB data.
ToI should explain why they focussed on this number; and why they did not just pick it up from the NCRB website.

Incredible India advertisements

or the idea that the problem for tourists in India is Indians.

I have below two videos from the Incredible India series featuring Aamir Khan:







There was also a recent ad that shows tourists disgusted at a kid peeing in the road, and other such "bad behavior" deemed by the tourism ministry.

First of all, almost every Incredible India ad I have seen features white people only - either young white women or young white men. I saw one ad with a Japanese person. I can understand that Bollywood stars won't feature in anything without white people, but this is not a song and dance feature after all.
The Incredible India campaign is commissioned by the tourism ministry. Someone up there in the ministry is approving these; so we have to wonder about the attitudes expressed in these ads. I AM taking them seriously as attitudes in the ministry and among our elite.

Attitudes in the ad
1. Tourists are white people, period; "internal" tourism, which counts for majority of tourists do not count. The Japanese, Korean and other eastern people don't generally count (even though they form a good percent of tourism targets anywhere in the world).
Africans! Don't even dare to show Aamir Khan with an African person. Darkies don't count.
2. The ads seem to mainly teach behavior - in front of white tourists. You better not have your kid pee in the road because white people may be watching. Thus, the ads seem to be (incredibly) suggest that individual people and their behavior may be a problem - more than (for example) the absence of clean public toilets.
By making such a suggestion, the ads present another way for Indians to judge other Indians. We behave a certain way because we are a developing country - a country still in the "Third World".
3. The ads always show white people "repulsed" by the bad behavior of Indians (such as throwing a banana peel from the bus). In that way, it assumes that they are judges of such behavior. On the contrary, I have personally seen Western tourists misbehaving in THAT SAME WAY. The reason is, of course, not difficult to find out - trash cans do not magically show up for them to drop trash in. Toilets don't magically show up for them alone. Given the Indian public systems's constraints, they behave the same way. They are in no position to judge.

Misguided Ads

More than anything, WHAT is the purpose of these ads? That is something I have a hard time figuring out - the ones that feature Aamir Khan and teach behavior - what exactly are they trying to do? They seem to take a sneering attitude at the guy spitting Paan, or the guy dropping a banana peel from a bus. But why is that a problem that the TOURISM ministry is concerned with? Are they going to provide decent public toilets throughout the country or trash cans in all public places? No. That is not their job. So why are they even preaching to people about this?
You could say the same thing about the eve teasing of the white women in the ad. What, is that exclusive to white women? Otherwise everything is fine with women in this country?

It seems suspiciously that the tourism ministry considers Indians in public places (behaving within the constraints and nature of our system) as a really bad nuisance.

But this fits in with my overall theme over the past couple of years - there is a tendency in India to blame people for systemic faults. These ads show that tendency.
Think about this for a minute - we all have heard of how Indians behave very well abroad, but not when they land in India. I have heard that from when I was young. The assumption is that the problem is with Indians. But in reality, the problem is with India, the system here - not with Indians. Like any other people around the world, Indians respond to incentives.
The proof of this, is that tourists or other people on business here from abroad (including white tourists) misbehave too! I have seen this personally in beach resorts. In fact they behave worse because they know that they are courted no matter what.
The ads show the thinking within the tourism ministry - and they are a pathetic lot.

Bollywood is not about movies

I will make a case below but let me lay out my conclusion first - Bollywood is not the Hindi film industry. Films are simply ancillary to it. Bollywood is a brand, a brand that helps corporations sell products using a small clique of new aristocrats. It is really about manufacturing artificial demand, by a tie-up of big media, consumer goods producers and film corporations. The movies and their release are at best ancillary to their purpose. The original Hindi movie industry has been taken over and supplanted by these corporations.

A Voyage of Discovery
I remember watching the Hindi movie "Kuch Kuch Hota Hai" in Devi theater, Chennai, back in 1999. This was Karan Johar's first directorial venture. The movie release was preceded by the usual promotions. One of these was an article in the magazine India Today. The magazine had a photograph of a college lobby with lockers for students and Sharukh Khan walking bouncing a basketball. The article said Hindi films were going through a resurgence in costumes, artwork and stories (I guess in that order). When I watched the movie I could feel it. The college in that movie seemed "like in America". The students had individual lockers (while my college barely had a bathroom). Kids went to a giant summer camp and the actors went from country to country. You would be forgiven for thinking that colleges in Bombay actually looked like the newer ones in the United States.
Later I learnt that the movie was a big hit in the United States and UK. Nothing critical came to my mind while watching the movie.
A few months later India Today again published a "puff piece" (as journalists call it) on the Hindi film world. It said that the movie industry was attracting the interest of corporations, both in India and abroad. The article mentioned that story discussions were now done using powerpoint presentations! There was talk of bound scripts and market analysis and such. The article thought it was a great thing. What could go wrong with that?
This corporatisation of that industry was more and more associated with professionalism. There was excitement that our movies would now be as "good" as Hollywood movies - after all Hollywood movies were made by corporations and now, so are ours! People talked of "genre" movies and much was made of Ram Gopal Verma's "Factory" production house.
Ten years later, there is not much to show for that corporate revolution. The powerpoint presentations seem to have made the situation worse. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Soon I was in the United States and the flood of promotions even there was astonishing. The movie Devdas was on the (desi) airwaves, television and online all the time. The movie did not do well in India, but it did well abroad. Suddenly we were in Cannes, for no good reason. Our movies were still bad, but Aishwarya Rai was on the red carpet...you know, the carpet reserved for white people! Who designed Aishwarya's wardrobe? and so on.
Initially this was amusing but me and many of my friends were annoyed that Hindi movies were so "westernized". A standard movie started like "A guy and a girl are sitting in the Waterloo station, London, talking..". Most Hindi movies that we came to know about (that is, that were promoted) were very weird, to say the least. Almost all the movies were set abroad. Even if they were set in India, it was an India that most of us had not seen - it had palatial buildings in which NRIs landed in helicopters, for one. You would not see a normal road or tea shop.
Even "Dil Chahtha Hai" which was a great story, showed a "global" Indian - a person who flew to Australia and went to operas.
It would be fine if there were a couple of movies like this, but every movie was this way. It was as if the stars will not act in "local" settings.
It revolted me and many of my friends so much that most of gave up watching Hindi movies.
To make fun of this trend, I wrote a blog post four years back - here. That post is still one of the most popular posts in this blog. But I believe I got it fundamentally wrong.

Post 2006
In the last few years, the Hindi movie industry increased in its weirdness - which they now called escapism. Watching a movie like "Black" or "Saawariya" or "Jaane tu ya Jaane Naa" or "Kabhi Alvidha Naa Kehna" was excruciatingly painful. They all acted like they were born and brought up in the West, while talking perfect Hindi. The colleges, costumes and everything seemed..incongruent. It did not make any sense.

Please note that in the last ten years, Bollywood, in spite of its insistent rebranding and propaganda (that is what it is), is still a loss making industry. They mostly depend now on a nostalgic NRI community. Most Hindi movies flop.
You have to wonder, then, what is going on. I had noticed these trends:
1. That the national film awards committee now gave more awards to Bollywood movies and presented more of those movies in foreign award shows.
2. That the actors and actresses were generally drawn from a small pool of models, celebrities or star children. There were rarely any "normal" actor who was promoted. This is unlike, for example, the Tamil of Malayalam movie industries (although the trend is noticeable now in Tamil).
3. That the movies rarely addressed any "real" issues or social issues. They showed, at best, relationship problems. There were no comments on caste, or women's issues or even traffic.
4. That the stars rarely seem to suffer from a flop - they simply act in another flop movie and then another and so on.

Realization sets in
I decided early last year that I would look for economic reasons for people acting a certain way, instead of blaming individuals or culture. I wrote a long post on this here.
What are the incentives for Bollywood? That was the question I wanted to answer. In my post making fun of Hindi movies, I had assumed that their "imitation" of the West (that makes movies look like fancy dress competitions) was born out of foolishness. I thought they were simply like the idiots who wore flowing gowns to coffee shops.
But what if they were not? What if we are the real idiots?
In other words, what are the incentives that makes Bollywood run the way it does? How can they make so many flop movies and survive on the same cycle of incongruent stories, huge promotions and finally bad letdowns?
The answer came from a close friend. She asked me to look up the term "brand ambassador" and a few actors' names.
For example, if you search for Abhishek Bachchan and brand ambassador, you see that he is promoting Videocon DTH, Motorola, BIG 92.7 FM, Idea! and so on.
Hrithik Roshan, who has been giving out flops for a long time, is the brand ambassador of Acer, Provogue, ITCis John Players, Reliance Mobile and so on.
Well they are established actors, after all.. how about new comer Ranbir Kapoor? He has only acted in three movies of which two were flops, right?
He is the brand ambassador for Pepsi, Nissan and Panasonic India!
Where am I going with this?
The "actors" are not really actors. They are really fronts for an elaborate corporate game.
What has happened is this:
1. Corporations move into making movies
2. They realize, quickly, that instead of going the hard route of actually making good movies, they can make a lot of money for themselves and the stars by USING the movie as a way to sell merchandise, music and consumer products.
3. The actors now can make more money by making advertisements than in movies (By the way, in spite of all the talk about Hollywood, Hollywood stars do not act in many advertisements). Indian movie actors have become, basically, advertising models.
4. The actors tie up with products, the movie corporations tie up with products - and so people make money whether the movie is a flop or not.
5. Then they sell the movie for television viewership and make a lot of money there too.
Shyam Benegal described this in a recent CineBlitz interview - the focus is on becoming a star, because as a star you can make money sheerly out of a "brand" name. All that you need is name recognition. You do NOT need to have acted in any successful movie.
In other words, the movies are actually "events" which help companies launch product prmotions. They do not signify ANYTHING more than that. What we look for, story, screenplay, acting, camera - all of these are really irrelevant for the ECONOMICS of the Bollywood industry.

Hence, I present you the retard looking Ranbir Kapoor, the unibrow Imran Khan and the building of a brand.

In a giant tie up between corporate media,corporate production houses, consumer goods sellers and corporate PR firms handling each and every aspect of an actor as a brand - the Hindi film industry is now taken over by a bunch of carpetbaggers.

You know this - look at the amount of propaganda unleashed on us by the media houses prior to the release of, say, Gajini or recently, Kites. There is such a network of product tie-ups that is difficlut to untangle.
The sole purpose, now, of a Bollywood movie is to launch advertising campaigns. It has NOTHING to do with a movie.

This explains some of trends I commented on earlier.
1. It explains why the star pool is open to a small clique - because the members of the new aristocracy have better connections and better name recognition. If all that you cared about was branding, why would you use a nameless actor from Bikaner?

2. Very importantly, it explains the SUBJECT matter of these movies - if your whole goal is to increase consumption and promote a lifestyle that "looks" rich, then you can see why Bollywood movies focus on relationship issues in New York or action sequences in the Bahamas. Why would they ever show actual issues? Why would they ever show caste or communal issues? Most movies look like an American teenager's (a particularly stupid one at that) fantasy. This is not escapism - they have simply called it escapism to justify their path.

3. Also, it is pointless, given this, to accuse movie makers of copying other movies. If your core problem is that your movie industry is about selling products rather than movies, then who cares if those movies are copied?

The corporations have taken over the mantle of all those who came before them, in an actual movie industry and then replaced them with Public Relations images. And they have sold those images to us.

Who is the loser in this? The Hindi movie audience has been had for suckers.
Ten years after the much-hyped corporate entries, this is the result.


PS: There is a possibility that someone would read this whole piece and decide that the issue is really that I am culturally backward or anti-Western or even anti-Corporations. I will just point out a couple of things for such people:
There are many movie industries around the world that are run by corporations. Although they do have issues sometimes in quality and some bias in favor of corporatism, none seem to have reached the low-point of our industry. The Hindi movie industry was not at a very high standard even during the 90's. There was already nepotism in the industry. But the corporations took all that and made it the current monster (The only consolation seems to be that the movies still suck but at least they show London around). Reflexively cheering corporations was wrong.
The incentives now are set up to ignore good movie making. They think that is INCIDENTAL to the "product" success.
When I say good movies I do not mean "Pather Panchali" type. I know people jump at that. I mean commercial movies like Munnabhai, at least. Do not pass of Krish as some kind of great movie so that we all feel happy that "our" India made a super hero movie. That is all I am saying.
Finally, before you accuse me of being anti-Western, anti-progress (people think both are the same) and all that, hold on. I just don't think there are ANY colleges in India where the kids look, dress or dance like in the movie "Jaane Tu Ya...". I would love such colleges, believe me, I would hang out there all the time. It is just that the movie looks like it is a fancy dress competition where you say, "let all of us pretend that we are all in an all-Indian Ivy League college somewhere in the UK and that we are all born and brought up there and talk in Hindi and our parents are all Indian but let us just say we have English customs...and so on".
That is not escapism, it is pathetic. As I explained, that movie was really about launching another set of product promotions and making Imran Khan a brand so that he can become another brand ambassador.

The Nithyananda Affair

(updated below)
I had a facebook conversation on this and I wanted to summarise my thoughts here:
1. The dumbest argument I have seen about this is that Nithyanada "cheated" people by engaging in false propaganda. I watched Sun TV for a half hour yesterday and I saw several advertisements for fairness creams, nutrition products that make your kids grow taller and claims about how Coca Cola makes you cool. ALL of that is false propaganda. Should we prosecute all of those companies and Sun TV for engaging in false propaganda?
We should realize that there is a religious industry out there; there is a market for their products. You may disagree with that - but the people who are gurus, devotees and followers have RIGHTS. You may think them delusional, but I think all "followers" and "devotees" of Jayalalitha or Karunanidhi are delusional.
Should we then arrest Jayalalitha or Karunanidhi, because they are engaged in "false propaganda"?
Whatever individuals think about other people's beliefs has no relevance to the law. Most people do not like other people in India. That does not mean we should go about prosecuting each other.
2. So, Sun TV telecast this video; and then police is obviously struggling to justify the completely unreasonable "popular" anger. If we had to prosecute people for their private affairs, most of us will be in jail. There is NO law by which a self-proclaimed holy man cannot have sex in private.
So we see the utterly ridiculous spectacle of a set of charges filed that make no sense. For example, Nithyananda has been charged with offending religious sensibilities! That law (more on section 295-A here) is so overly broad that anyone can be charged and noone can be convicted in a sane court.
The idea that holy men now better not have sex or otherwise they will be LEGALLY prosecuted is just hilarious. This is a moral issue, not for courts. The case will be thrown out of court and rightly so.

3. Let us consider the following cases:
- a politician declares in a party meeting that he/she will go in a bicycle to work every day. After he/she comes to power, can they be sued if they take a car to work? Can the police file charges? No
- a product says that consuming it makes people strong. Can the people who consume it then sue the product for not making them strong? No.
- a holy man says he is celibate. People follow him. Can the police sue him if he is proved to be not celibate? No (apart from the impossibility of proving whether someone violated celibacy. Masturbation violates celibacy - so I bet Sun TV is going to have a video of this guy's bathroom coming out soon)

4. I have not touched upon Sun TV's utter arrogance in telecasting this in prime time. In a sane country, their license will be revoked. I do not know if the newsroom guys consulted with their lawyers.
We are now entering a new age of "proto-fascism" in Tamil Nadu.
Sun TV and the Karunanidhi family now control television, cable distribution, movie production, FM radio, and newspapers. I think this is their first demonstration that they are not answerable to anyone and can manipulate Tamil people as they want to.
We have a long fight ahead to rid ourselves of this family's control.

5. One of the factors that surprises me is the contempt that people express for followers of such "godmen" as the media calls them. I have seen a bunch of people shaking their heads (on television) and talking about the followers as if they are sheep.
In the modern era, we are ALL sheep. We either worship digital products, celebrities, businessmen, politicians or godmen. I don't know why we pretend that followers of religious gurus are uniquely dumb. The average DMK, ADMK or Congress worker worships at politicians' altar. Why are they better than devotees?

6. More than anything I want to highlight a subtle problem in Tamil politics. For a long time the Kazhagams (DK, DMK, PMK and ADMK) have been calling themselves rationalist. The truth is these guys are far removed from any rationality or scientific approach to anything. A rational movement will not have made such a nasty issue of Kushboo's statement about women a few years back.
But this guise of a rational base has twisted popular culture in Tamil Nadu and taken it towards such unreasonable response to the Nithyananda scandal. I have seen NO public or media figure come out and call this affair for what it is - a violation of privacy by Sun TV is the core issue here. That a corporation can telecast the private affairs of an individual is shocking. This means that you and I are not protected from such violations either. Sun TV is not just the press - it is a media corporation that has stepped in forcefully into a citizen's privacy.
THAT is the chilling aspect of this "scandal". yet, I don't see ANY media or public figure come out and call a spade a spade.
The reason is that lynching Nithyananda (a religious figure) gives people the impression that it is a very rational thing to do.
That is, the narrative has become:
A public person was cheating people. The brave Sun TV folks exposed his true face. they performed the role of a true press.

The above story is appealing, but is FALSE. I am all for Sun TV exposing public corruption such as by the political parties. But I have never seen such coverage by Sun TV. Instead here they have violated the law and broken the privacy of a private citizen. As I explained above, I can be a god man, say anything and people are free to believe or disbelieve me. That does not violate the law. IF THAT violates the law, then every politician, banker, and most businessmen will be in jail.
The function of society is a balance between private rights, freedom of speech, government powers and press freedom. In this particular case the violator of this balance is Sun TV NOT Nithyananda.
But (I may be wrong), most people are unaware of such distinctions in India. They confuse morality and legality.
Sun TV has now moved one step more in getting into our lives. Being the most powerful network, the above perspective will not even make it into any media coverage.
No one is going to talk about the absurdity of prosecuting a person under section 295-A for having sex.

Update:
I missed another aspect of this issue. One of the reasons why everyone sounds enraged about this issue (but secretly enjoys it) is the sexual starvation in this country. This is a state in which women cannot travel freely in buses because of the constant groping by sex-starved men. Slowly the TV media have been ratcheting up the levels of sex and violence in reality shows, television serials, movies and advertisements. The public has been told that we are "modernising"; but no modern society tolerates this level of objectification of women in their media. I know that the US media constantly gets pushback from parents and consumer organizations. Their society is not as sex-starved as we are.
The Nithyananda affair is probably less about any exposure of wrong-doing; it seems to be more about pushing the boundaries of such sexual exposure. Anyone in advertising knows that the cheapest and easiest way to be "creative" is to go directly to sex appeal.
By showing such sick voyeuristic images, Sun TV has reserved the option to push the sex envelope to the extreme. They now know they have their audience captured and unable to fight back. Now, our kids and family will be sitting and watching news when they will be shown naked images of Sun TV's choice. We will all be told that these are features of a modern society. Every other media house will follow through.
Kalanidhi Maran owns us.

The Indian English Media

This is going to be a long post.
For the past couple of years I have been observing the English news channels in television and also online portals such as rediff.com and IndiaTimes.com. A pattern emerges, but I wonder about the causal factors for news reporting in India.

Two Recent Campaigns

The IPL move to South Africa and Tata Nano's launch are two cases in point. To any dispassionate observer watching the news reporting, it must be obvious that the media went nuts with both. They hysterically covered Tata Nano's launch so much that it seemed Tata needed no additional marketing. One reporter, self-reighteously asked Tata what he would say to Mamata Bannerjee, as if Mamata's campaign was somehow against the Nano (it was not). Tata, of course, is a businessman; even though the media tried to project him as a warrior against politics in this country, he knew his place. So he just said "Good afternoon". But that statement was enough for the media to interpret as some kind of witty come back to the evil Mamata.
On the two days following the Nano's launch, rediff had a total of 39 stories on the launch. Many of these did not read like news - it was as if Tata had paid rediff, Indiatimes and all those English television channels.

At around the same time, the IPL controversy was gathering momentum. On the day IPL decided to move out of India, rediff publishes the following lead-up to a discussion forum: http://cricket.rediff.com/report/2009/mar/22/ipl-message-board.htm
That particular article has to be read to be believed. A basic journalistic standard is to clearly show the difference between editorializing (expressing opinion) and news reporting. This helps readers understand that what you are talking about may not be facts, but your own opinion.
The above article blurs that distinction and presents the IPL organizer point of view as if it is objective fact. It does it through some standard tricks - such as omitting quotation marks from quotes.

While the government did not want to take chances with the security after the attack by gunmen on Sri Lankan cricketers in Lahore [Images], it also lost a lot of revenue and a chance to show that the country is a safe place to host sports events, keeping in mind next year's Commonwealth Games [Images].

The BCCI also apologised to fans, saying the government had left them with no other option. It made it clear that a lot of money was at stake and the Board along with the franchises and broadcasters could not afford to lose so much.
...
Who do you blame for depriving Indian fans of the high-octane action in the IPL, which was a mega success in its first year?

At first glance it seems as if rediff is doing this violation of ethical journalism so that they can support the BJP.
In both these news stories, the media went overboard, with the English TV channel's 24 hour coverage of the Nano. Watching the pathetic emptyheads on television cheerleading for a car, we can easily blame them for being without substance. It is clear that in both these cases, the media is forcing a certain narrative down the throats of viewers. The question is why they do that.

What is at Stake
In India media criticism is rare, but before I make a case I have to explain what is at stake here. After watching decades of doctored news from outlets like the Tamil Sun Television or Jaya Television, it is natural for us to assume that the media, like any other institution can report whatever they deem as news. At least that is what they say.
The Corporatised media needs to earn money, true. But we should not forget that a honest press is one of the pillars of democracy. They have responsibilities to the public beyond earning money. They have strict ethical guidelines for news reporting.
More than anything, the press enjoys a host of benefits from the government. A member of the press enjoys access to high officials and is definitely more powerful than an ordinary citizen.
Without a free press that is not acting as a tool for the rich and powerful, we may as well call off our democracy experiment. People curse politicians all the time and celebrate corporations as repositories of all that is good and benevolent. But we ought to be cursing our corporate media too, for letting down the majority people's interests.
Having said that let us analyze two views for the corruption of media.

Ezra Klein and the Media Narrative- A Charitable View
There is a charitable view we can take about the media behavior. That is explained in this classic post by Ezra Klein, a leading liberal blogger in the USA. Klein was talking about the nature of the American media, but it applies here too (emphasis mine):

I think one aspect of the modern press that doesn't get enough attention -- either among folks in the media or folks critiquing it -- is the transition from the fundamental scarcity being information to information being in abundance and the fundamental scarcity being mediation.
...
If everyone got a newspaper once a day, and there were eight political stories, and all of them were different each day, and one of them had pointed out that Palin actually did support the Bridge to Nowhere, then the press would indeed have done its job. The job was to report the story, and they reported it.

But cable news and blogs and radio sort of changed all that and now there's too much information, and so consumers largely rely on the press to arrange that information into some sort of coherent story that will allow them to understand the election. And the press assumed that role -- they didn't create some new institution, or demand that the cable channels be credentialed differently and understood as "political entertainment."

They fill this new role through the methods storytellers have always used to tell stories: the repetition of certain key themes and characters, which creates continuity between one day's events and the next and helps the audience understand which parts to pay attention to. It's sort of like a TV show:

In the case of the Nano, it was obvious from the first that there was a narrative here - a businessman is let down by powerful, evil politicians such as Mamta Bannerjee. He takes his show and leaves for the arms of another, more business-savvy leader (Narendra Modi). And he finally releases his car thereby satisfying the dreams of millions.
The press chose this narrative and ran with it, even though there were big holes in the story - for example, Tata had an private agreement with the Communist government in West Bengal for land transfer in Singur. If he was so noble, he would never have tried to go for such a deal. Secondly, during the entire controversy, Tata himself never expressed any antipathy to a deal with the politicians - he knew that he needed them as they need him.
Thirdly, Tata's cars in Gujarat are now heavily subsidized by the tax payer. There are estimates that Rs.50,000 to 60,000 of each Nano is borne by the tax payer. If Tata was a people's hero, he would never have tried to wrestle such concessions from elected governments. Gujarat has literally bribed a single businessman enormously to base his plant in their state.
This is transparently not capitalism, but the media thought the narrative was powerful. The same narrative idea holds for the IPL, where Lalit Modi was the new brave warrior against government.
So, it is entirely possible that the Indian corporate media is simply building these narratives and presenting well-packaged stories to the Indian public (even though they are violating news standards) - because that has become their job in this age of "too much information".
But then there is another possibility.

The Indian Media and Elitism
We should note that every narrative the media builds somehow enables and enriches private business elite. I suspect that the IPL controversy made the private business elite go crazy because government seemed to be saying that business was not the most important thing in the world. They screamed about lost revenue for the government - if government's purpose is only revenue making we should probably rent out Parliament House in the summer.
But over the past few years there is a strong streak of class warfare in our media. It is clear that the media tries to suggest the following:
1. Government should be run like a business
2. Any government "inteference" to regulate the private business world is a travesty of capitalism.
3. The interests of everyone in India is closely allied with the interests of business people
4. Businessmen are noble
During the IPL auction, which they feverishly covered, the media stars declared "What Recession?" because the amounts in the auction were astronomical. Meanwhile ordinary construction workers were facing the recession alright. In fact everyone was feeling the recession probably except for the narrow band that the media glorifies. P.Sainath wrote an excellent article on this elitist coverage here.
I am not sure how much the media has succeeded in this myth creation - reality, like the Satyam fiasco, kind of tends to expose their stars for what they are.
But it seems to me that the media is performing this dance around private business because their own corporate masters see what we all see - that in India the business class has an excellent opportunity to suppress a class struggle. It never fully worked in the developed countries, but they see an opportunity here.
This is why I reject the view that the media is directly paid by Tata or Lalit Modi to do their marketing. It is more subtle than that. They get access and power and form an alliance that blurs the real issues at stake in modern India.
They think they have formed a heady concoction using Cricket stars, Bollywood's talentless tarts and "lifestyle" issues.
I got a glimpse into their inner workings in an article by Tehelka editor, Tarun Tejpal, 3 weeks after the Mumbai attacks. In that article, Mr.Tejpal talks about a media consultant who lost his life at the Taj. But he also talks about what these consultants advise - they apparently guide media corporations towards such "lifestyle" issues and meaningless trivia in news. They think this is what the public is asking for. This is why your local newspaper publishes a lifestyle section with unrelated stuff about Paris Hilton and Brad Pitt.

As a more interesting note, corporatization seems to have directly caused this abuse of power and a complete corruption of journalistic ideals. So much for the glory of private business and businessmen...

As much as we hate politicians, we have as much to fear from the corruption of this new monster in the block.