THE PEN WOULD STOP BUT THE SPIRIT WOULD GOFOREVER: A LOOK INTO VINOD MEHTA’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO INDIAN JOURNALISM

Source: The Indian Express

However, for me Muslims meant korma, Christians meant cake and pastries, Sikhs meant hot halwa, Anglo-Indians meant mutton cutlets, Parsees meant dhansak. The solitary Jewish family in town did not come within my grasp, so I apologize for excluding them. And so wrote Vinod Mehta in his luminously beautiful autobiography Lucknow Boy: A Memoir. A person who held a third-class BA Degree by his own admissions, Mehta indeed managed to rise above the rubble in his chosen field. When the celebrated television journalist Arnab Goswami, often criticized for his cynical attitude, calls Mehta the editor he never had, it becomes clear vis-à-vis the lofty position that was enjoyed by Mehta amongst the Indian scribes.

Some people might call his death on the March 8, 2015, as the end of an era and others might christen it as one of the saddest episodes in the history of Indian English writing but people who knew him closely would say that with the demise of Mehta, Indian journalism would take an altogether different turn and not necessarily in the desired direction. Mehta represented the conscience in Indian journalism to the core and unlike the bigger lot of Indian journalists he never followed any unnecessary craze. A forthright person, he based his journalism on precision and plain facts. This paragraph from the stables of Arnab Goswami perfectly sums it up:

But does this admiration for Vinod mean I agreed with him? Absolutely not. In fact, he and I struggled to agree on anything more weighty than the quality of sandwich served in the Times Now studio. We disagreed on Kashmir, on Pakistan, on Naxalism and the long essays his magazine published on it, on the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party. In fact, the disagreements on issues were so obvious he chose to stay away on Newshour debates on the subjects because he and I would end up quarrelling on it, taking up most of the time. But it was an honest disagreement, a direct one. Not the cloak and dagger kind that some circles in Lutyens journalism like. Unlike those who boycotted him after he did journalism a good turn by exposing the Radia tapes, Vinod was neither judgmental nor preachy nor defensive. He was just himself.

In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to note that Mehta was the saving light of journalism in India when corporate interests held a vice-like grip on truth and facts. If we were to sift through the pages of his illustrious career, we would be able to see that he always held his forte against all the pressures of the corporate lobby. Senior editors who worked under him maintain that he always inspired people to come up with their own viewpoints. Mehta always had time and space for well-conceived opinions.

Although critics always labelled him as a staunch leftist, he was not one. He was one of those welcome breaks from the usual clutter of supposed intellectuals who considered following Leftism as the sole criteria for being one. He held a very secular and liberal outlook and believed in disagreements. A look at his journey would confirm that he never had any distinct political inclination. Rather, he believed in constructive criticism.

Born in Rawalpindi in Undivided India in the year 1942, Mehta spent much of his childhood in the sleepy royal bastion of Lucknow. His reasonably long stay in the UK back in the sixties of the last century opened him up the developments in world affairs. This rendezvous left a deep impact on his life and worldview. The fact that he wrote about one of his old affairs and the daughter that he had from that affair well sums up the way he looked at his life – open and up for public review. A democrat to the core, Mehta and his way of life was aptly described by his ex-colleague Ajaj Ashraf in a memoriam in Firstpost:

Rarely will proprietors now countenance an editor such as Vinod, fiercely, and fearlessly, countering their propensity to exploit the media they owned for promoting their business interests – and compromising the avowed independence of journalism through partisanship. A person who believed every word that he wrote, Mehta could be accused of anything but hypocrisy. As much as we disagree with his way of journalism, it possibly could not be forgotten that Mehta redefined Indian journalism to a substantial degree. He has often been criticized for being too close to the Nehru-Gandhi family, but his Lucknow Boy confessions clarify that it was more of an alliance of convenience than anything else.

Acclaimed for writing some of the most powerful editorials in Outlook Magazine, Mehta has often come under political flak. A non-judgemental person, Mehta always strived to adopt a neutral stand on anything before finding out the facts. Another paragraph from Ashraf in the same memoriam defines the breed of journalism that Mehta followed:

In an era where brevity seems a form of tyranny, Vinod ran lengthy, iconoclastic essays of Arundhati Roy, one of which ran well over 30 pages of an Outlook edition. He featured stories that others did not dare touch. It was his impeccable integrity, his being incorruptible, that was most impressive.

In an earlier interview with Rediff.com, Mehta described his own experiences about writing an autobiography and this description perfectly fits into the mould that has been his trademark – a dollop of modesty mixed with a significant dosage of self-awareness. People who harp on humility all the time, the following chunk of text would not be their favourite for sure:

In some way, the rawness and inexperience and lack of sophistication has its own charm because it tells the reader what kind of person I was at that time, how much I knew about the art of writing a biography. Which, quite frankly, was not too much.

While editing The Pioneer, which Mehta re-launched in the early nineties of the last century, he changed the editorial policies thereby giving youngsters the opportunity to articulate their views on the edit page, which otherwise used to be an unbreakable bastion for the elderly lot. Not that he was unaware about his editorial prowess, he often had the guts to go against the tide and publish stuff that was unthinkable for a larger lot of the Indian editors.

Essentially an anti-establishment person, he was fierce in his opinions and never relegated from any stance that he took. Known for adopting some of the boldest steps in the history of Indian journalism, he also wrote a couple of controversial biographies – one on the yesteryear star Meena Kumari and the other on the immensely powerful Sanjay Gandhi, who was touted to be the future Prime Minister of the country back in the seventies of the last century. Both the biographies garnered more acclaim that he had anticipated and made it to the best-selling list of books.

Smita Gupta, writing for The Hindu post his death, maintains, “If he had an unerring instinct for a good story, he also knew precisely how to spin a done to death story to extend its shelf life. He revelled in controversies and scandals.”

The fact that Mehta had an unwavering penchant for controversies also forms an inseparable part of his existence. He was constantly under watch, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for bad ones. This only made his life more colourful and more worthy to follow.

He was one of the first Indian editors to come out of the usual confines of editorial redundancies and made news an interesting commodity. He believed in provoking his target audience, in testing their patience and in propelling them to act against things that, he believed, were intrinsically wrong. A person did not have to agree with him to admire him.

In his brief stint as the editor of The Sunday Observer, he infused new blood into the mundane existence of weekly newspapers. He made people to sit up and take notice. As the editor of Debonair, he was fair, simple and innovative. It is indeed a matter of joy and élan that advancing age couldn’t suck the spirit out of him. If Khushwant Singh marked the advent of new Indian journalism, Mehta carried forward the trend in a befitting way.

When Mehta was the editor of the Indian Post, the doyens in India were threatened by its sheer presence. What Mehta could effortlessly do with his scathing editorials, many newspapers could not do with their exclusive coverage. At his helm, Mehta represented the indomitable spirit of youth and that too at an age far from being young. Roscoe Mendoza, writing for Rediff.com probably describes Mehta’s character the best when he writes the following lines:

Mr Mehta's jousts with owners and politicians taught many in the trade that editorial freedom is not given, it has to be fought for daily, and seized, especially in these times when the borders between journalism and paid-for-content masquerading as the real thing has permeated almost every newspaper in the land barring a couple.