New Delhi, Dec. 2: As the blame game for intelligence and operational lapses before and during the Mumbai terror assault gets underway, those running for cover are lumping the media with the burden of collateral responsibility.
Navy chief Admiral Sureesh Mehta today pointedly accused the media of giving away crucial tactical moves by the forces. “All over the world the media is an enabling instrument of the state. In India, it is a disabling instrument,” he told a news conference to mark navy week, adding, “I think you really need to consider if there is really need for this extensively heavy reporting of the kind that we have seen from Mumbai. There are tactical implications. When there are ongoing operations you show commandos coming down from a helicopter and these terrorists were getting information on their cellphones.”
The experience of journalists covering the terror attacks would suggest quite the contrary. Security agencies not only appeared happy to provide the media a 24x7 ringside view of the action, they were also actively competing to claim credit.
The media coverage of the country’s worst brush with terror may well kindle a fresh debate on the virtues and perils of providing live, close-up access, especially to television, while operations are under way, but there isn’t an existing policy or code that the media has transgressed.
As one television anchor in Mumbai said at the height of the crisis: “Should the government decide to throw a cover on operations and ask us to leave in the interests of security, we will have no option but to leave. The fact is no such instructions have come and as journalists we went wherever we could.”
A similar absence of media management strategy had left the 1999 Kargil conflict open to unbridled reportage during the first month. It was only after the authorities realised some of the coverage might be hurting defence interests that they began controlling access to the field of battle and providing daily briefings on the progress of the war.
None of that was in evidence in Mumbai. No control on the media, no composite briefings on what was happening in the operations. There were inspired leaks and briefings but they all suggested lack of planning and cohesion on the part of authorities — instead of a comprehensive security brief to the media, different agencies were conducting their own shows and peddling their own claims.
On the second night of the operations, for instance, the army declared the Taj complex “cleared” of terrorists that was to prove a false and expensive claim.
A senior army officer requested to be interviewed on the progress of operations by a leading English news channel. The army seemed cut up with the media about the credit NSG commandos were getting. Several television news channel editors and producers were inundated with text messages requesting that the army be given its due credit — the NSG is made up of “boys” seconded from the army after all!
Admiral Mehta’s own officers and soldiers were not shy of using the media as the operations proceeded.
While the navy chief today advised the media of “exercising caution” in reporting tactical operational details, the chief of the Western Naval Command, Admiral Jagjit Singh Bedi, chose to go on live television during the operations and gave an interview to a channel during which he also showed photographs of what the Marcos had found on the militants.
A masked Marcos (Marine Commandos) officer also went on live television on the operations in the Taj.
On the Taj-Gateway deck, the scene of the worst carnage, print and television journalists were bivouacked barely 150m from the action and nobody ever ordered the cameras to be switched off. Likewise at the Oberoi-Trident complex.
Around Nariman House, which lies in a more congested and populated alley of Colaba, media teams were allowed to crawl about, even at the expense of overcrowding the area and probably cramping operations. The truth, though, is that no arm of authority — civilian or military — seemed to mind.
