As Adani Group takes over IANS wire, some pertinent observations

Mayank Chhaya-

The announcement that India’s controversial Adani Group has acquired a 50.5 percent stake in the newswire IANS India unleashes a flood of memories for me; in particular my over a decade-long association with it, significantly helping build it into India’s once most credible independent source of non-partisan news.

Tarun Basu, IANS’s original founder and editor-in-chief from 1986, and I, first as its Bombay chief of bureau in 1987 and then its South Asia Chief Correspondent in 1989, were at the core of the newswire’s nascent operations in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was Tarun’s vision to create a worldclass newswire out of India that started it all. It was his background, first in the United News of India (UNI) and then Deutsche Presse-Agentur or DPA, the German-owned global newswire, that came into play while building IANS from scratch. I was among its earliest recruits in 1987.

In fact, when Tarun and I met for the first time in Bombay that year at the now defunct Samovar restaurant near the Jehangir Art Gallery I had just left the Associated Press (AP), the giant American newswire as its Bombay bureau chief. Tarun made it a point to tell me that beyond writing for India Abroad, I would have the opportunity to write for its new wire operations used by several newspapers. Even then he was clear that he wanted to make it into India’s first global newswire.

It was originally named India Abroad News Service (IANS) as an offshoot of the pioneering and best-known New York-based Indian American weekly newspaper India Abroad founded by the late Gopal Raju. At its founding the idea was to eventually become a credible, high quality, independent news agency that offered a uniquely Indian perspective on global affairs. In the years that followed my first meeting, it did indeed become some measure of that vision.

As India Abroad News Service right until the time I left in 1997 it had correspondents/stringers across the world, including out of Australia, Fiji, Malaysia, Singapore, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, parts of the Middle East, South Africa, Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, across the U.S., Canada, Brazil, the Caribbean. It was an unprecedented news footprint for an Indian wire run on an excruciatingly tight budget but with impeccably written, edited and sourced stories. All of those stories were run in India Abroad, which was once described by The Economist as a weekly of “unusually high quality” for a non-mainstream paper.

The most exciting if frequently frustrating part was that every story first came to Delhi, which meant that Tarun and I had to edit every single one of them. The volume of stories increased from ten or so a day to about ten times a day in the early 1990s. More often than not, I used to be the one editing and rewriting the wire feed from around the world. I was familiar with global issues as wide-ranging as from the separatist politics of Parti Québécois, a sovereignist party in Quebec in Canada, to the post-Soviet breakup angst in Russia and from Trinidad’s Indian Trinidadian-dominated politics to Fiji’s equally Indian-dominated politics. That was because everything went through the IANS hub in Jor Bagh, Delhi.

It was astonishing that for quite sometime with just two journalists, Tarun and I, who also did an enormous amount of firsthand reporting from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, were at the heart of the wire editing operations.

In the early 1990s, even though the desktop was already in use in newspaper operations, there were many IANS subscribers in India who still wanted the old-fashioned ticker tape. That meant every story that Tarun and I cleared was printed and handed to the remarkably good-cheered and efficient teleprinter technician Chandrapal Kashyap who would literally churn out dozens of ticker tapes which were packed in yellow manilla envelopes along with physical copies of the same stories. Since many of our subscribers were non-English newspapers, they needed printed copies for translation by their copy editors. Every morning by 10 or so Ashok Sharma, an unfailingly reliable courier would go to newspaper offices in the city to deliver the first batch of customized packets on his scooter. This went on for years.

To think that that scrappy and gutsy newswire operation is now taken over by a giant conglomerate with a checkered reputation as a “strategic acquisition” is a strange feeling. In principle, I have no problem with news operations being bought and sold. That comes with the territory but it is important who buys them and what their intentions are. On the face of it, the intentions here may not be journalistic in the strict professional sense. Sure, there would be some thin veneer of what may remotely resemble journalism but by and large the larger purpose is something else.

It is a pity because even now, especially now, there is great potential for IANS to become a truly independent global wire. Tarun and I reminisced this morning a bit about the wire. We both think that it again has a great opportunity to rival the likes of the AP, Reuters, AFP, Bloomberg and DPA if Adani Group has the sense to recognize that the most important asset for a newswire is its credibility. If it is going to look for lackeys in its ranks who do the official bidding both for the group’s owners and their political benefactors, then this would be a pointless investment.

Photo caption: Tarun Basu (sitting) and I at the Jor Bagh office of IANS and India Abroad circa 1992/1993.