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The Messengers of Bad News
A Keynote Address
By Anand Patwardhan
 Anand
Patwardhan is a leading social action filmmaker in India, where
his work on subjects including poverty, peace, development and citizen
activism have been shown on television and contributed to social
movements. His remarks were delivered to a film festival audience
attending the International
Documentary Conference held in conjunction with the Silverdocs
Documentary Film Festival on June 16, 2004. The event was
co-sponsored by the World Bank and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
When I was invited to make this keynote presentation
the most daunting but also the most tempting circumstance was the
nature of the audience I would be addressing. It isn’t every
day that someone like me gets to speak to decision makers and gate
keepers from the North and the South, as well as filmmakers and
film users from across the world.
I won’t dwell on things like High Definition,
as I’m convinced that people from the developing world take
no time to catch up with new technologies once these become affordable,
as we witnessed with the DV revolution.
The real issues of the information gathering and disseminating
systems have more to do with what kinds of programs are made, who
makes and airs them and what impact they have.
The role of the developed world as consumer and the
role of the developing world as the consumed may now be complicated
as the latter yields its own voracious elite, but the former continues
to determine taste.
In all this, those who originally set out to highlight
and try to undo the injustices of the world find themselves marginalized
and out of date unless they have the chutz pah and the marketing
genius of a Michael Moore.
In many parts of the world, including I am afraid
in America, these woes are further compounded by censorship, both
overt and covert, and its more insidious sibling – self-censorship.
And yet the voices of resistance have not altogether
disappeared. My keynote will discuss the need to bring them out
of the margins.
Let me be frank. For many years now whatever I’ve
experienced on the ground and all the reading and research I’ve
come across leads me to the belief that I stand right now in the
camp of the enemy.
Of course the fact that I am here at all must mean
that within the enemy camp there are obviously some friends. In
any case I am an unworthy but ardent admirer of Gandhi. And so cannot
see individuals as the enemy, but only institutions. And believe
that enemies need not be forever. And that dialogue is the way forward.
So here is the attempt at dialogue, illustrated by a few film clips
and photographs. The material isn’t representative or comprehensive
as my time slot prevents a more detailed approach and my access
is limited by the same global forces that prevent all of us from
seeing more such images in the normal course of our lives.
The first clip is from a film we began in 1983. At
that time India was just opening its doors to foreign capital. The
city of Bombay was on a beautification drive and the first victims
were the homeless.
4 mins excerpt from "Bombay Our City" (1985)
 (In
the clip an angry slumdweller whose home has just been demolished
accuses the filmmakers of exploiting images of poverty and injustice
without being able to alter conditions in any way)
I chose this clip in part to reassure those who may
have been upset at being addressed as the enemy that I was referring
also to the enemy within. As a member of the Indian intelligentsia
I know that all my good intentions don’t by themselves ensure
that my work rises above voyeurism and becomes useful to the people
I filmed. Bombay Our City made its share of noise in
India and even won a national award for Best Documentary but the
huts of the homeless continued to be demolished. We joined a movement
for the Right to Shelter. After one of the slums we had filmed in
was razed, some slum-dwellers and myself went on an indefinite hunger
strike to demand resettlement. The following day a famous Bollywood
star Shabana Azmi, who had seen Bombay Our City joined our
hunger strike. We became front page news overnight. Within 5 days
the government gave in and the evicted were granted an alternate
site.
Later we took Doordarshan, our national TV, to court
for refusing to telecast Bombay Our City. After 4 years the
Bombay High Court upheld my right to freedom of speech and the public's
right to information and ordered the national channel to screen
the film. We won four more court cases over the years to get my
films screened on national TV. They were shown unannounced and grudgingly
but it was symbolically important and aroused hope at the time.
Today this hope feels like a mirage. The logic of
globalization - the empowerment of the elite and the pauperization
of the poor has ensured that today’s India is even less hospitable
to the working poor than before.
By the mid 80’s our focus on the rights of workers
shifted to the task of combating fundamentalism. The end of the
Cold War should have ushered an era of peace and prosperity. Instead
we saw the USA increase its militarist posture and we also saw a
global increase in religious fundamentalism. If you stop to think
about it, the two things are not unconnected but that’s another
story.
Meanwhile in Ayodhya in Northern India, Hindu fundamentalists
tore down a 16th century Muslim mosque, claiming it as
the birthplace of the Hindu God Ram. It led to nation wide carnage
and the tremors from this act still reverberate.
4 mins excerpt from “In the Name of God”
(1992)
(In the clip a Hindu militant en route to demolish
the Babri Mosque states that the murder of Mahatma Gandhi
was perfectly justified as Gandhi had betrayed the cause of the
Hindu majority)
Our film was made before the demolition of
the Babri mosque and should have alerted the nation to the hatred
and carnage that would inevitably follow. But films like these remain
grossly under-utilized in a nation divided by the politics of hate.
The 80’s and 90's not only brought us religious
violence. They also brought the dream of development. It was a dream
that would carefully hide from everyone except its immediate victims,
the price of this development. It was a dream that came wrapped
in the flamboyant and seductive rhetoric of a world economy that
was neither actually free nor actually democratic.
6 mins excerpt from "A Narmada Diary" (1995)
 (In
the clip members of the “Narmada Bachao Andolan - Save Narmada
River Movement” confront officials of the World Bank and ask
them to stop funding the project)
To be fair, the World Bank, having kick-started the
Sardar Sarovar Dam, did attempt to rectify its mistake. The independent
Morse Commission paid heed to the voices of the displaced and finally
the Bank pulled out. But the damage had been done. Today in the
face of mounting evidence that this dinosaur is completely unsustainable,
the Indian government continues to finance its folly. The only lesson
our politicians and project builders have learnt is that large projects
mean large kickbacks. So now the great new game in India is
a multi-billion dollar, thoroughly improbable project to inter-link
our rivers.
How could all this happen? My view is that it has
to do with the near absolute ideological control that is exercised
over the global media. The images the world needs to see, the facts
it needs to hear, are often doctored or suppressed. Let us look
at some:
Images
1. Tiannamen Square
This image of an unknown Chinese student stopping
tanks during the pro-democracy movement at Tianamen Square in 1989
was flashed all over the world and rightly became one of the most
famous symbols of heroic non-violent resistance.
2. Rachel Corrie
This image shows Rachel Corrie an American peace
activist, trying to stop an Israeli bull-dozer from demolishing
Palestinian homes. Unlike the tanks of Tiananmen, the bulldozer
did not stop. It crushed Rachel Corrie to death. Unlike the images
of resistance of the Chinese student, images of Rachel Corrie’s
heroism and sacrifice were never highlighted long enough to register
on the conscience of the world.
Let us move from an act of omission to an act of commission.
Saddam Statue close up
These close up and mid shots of jubilation in Baghdad
during the famous toppling of Saddam’s statue were globally
broadcast giving the world the visual impression that Saddam was
hated by the general population of Iraq and American troops were
widely welcomed as saviours.
3. Saddam statue long shot
 A
much less publicized long shot of the same sequence gives the real
story. The square is almost deserted. The statue is being pulled
down not by ordinary Iraqi citizens but by ropes attached to an
American armoured car. The handful of people at the square are mostly
directly connected to the Occupation forces.
There is another great lie embedded in the incident
of the Saddam statue. The US flag that was draped over the face
of Saddam’s statue was the flag that purportedly fell
from the World Trade Center. Thus although no proof of any connection
between Saddam and Al Quaeda or any of the suspected perpetrators
of 9/11 has ever been furnished, a non-verbal connection was established
by the US army and the media. Such subliminal messages go a long
way to explain why 80% Americans still believe that Saddam was directly
or indirectly responsible for 9/11.
When I spoke of the enemy it was not because of race
or culture although racism and civilizational arrogance remain alive
and well in the corridors of power and in the media.
A few obvious examples. Hollywood in the name of historic
authenticity recreated every lash and gash suffered by Jesus Christ
but neglected to nail the lie that Jesus was a white man.
It remains hard to switch on my TV screen without
spotting Anglo Saxons traipsing through Africa or Asia explaining
to me its dark secrets. In contrast, despite the fact that there
is no shortage of cinematic and intellectual competence in the developing
world, parachute reporters from the North still dominate the spaces
where our stories are told.
The truth is that not only is the North not letting
us tell our own stories, it is not letting anybody tell the
stories that matter. Like the story of why Rachel Corrie died.
Or why Mr.Kelly, the British government’s arms expert died.
What happened to the weapons of mass destruction? Where are the
stories about War and Oil and the 20,000 tons of Depleted Uranium
that have been dropped on Iraq?
During the Cold War it was said that an iron curtain
prevented information from getting in or out of the Communist Bloc.
Today a velvet curtain of mindless infotainment envelops the globe
enforcing a strict censorship of the vital stories of our times.
In the face of this disconnect many people and institutions
genuinely believe they are bringing development to the world - in
the same way perhaps that the USA believes it is bringing democracy
to Iraq. Both these sets of beliefs are possible because of the
circuitous nature of the information paradigm. You hear what you
want to hear. Your filters are clogged with the residue of the horrors
they have filtered out. Once in a while the flash of an American
soldier gloating over the mutilated corpse of a prisoner shocks
the nation and the world into questioning its core beliefs but soon
the spin doctors are back in action. Soon we are told that what
we thought of as torture was only “prisoner abuse” done
after all for “enduring freedom”.
Whom does this filtering process hurt the most? Who
will pay the price of killing the messenger of bad news? Who will
remain bewildered by the fact that increasing numbers of people
in the world no longer believe in the good guys?
If international bodies like the World Bank and the
United Nations remain so eternally grateful that their head offices
are located on the soil of America that they find it impossible
to hold the USA responsible for any wrongdoing, how can they retain
credibility in the eyes of the world?
I was lucky to have studied in America in 1970. The
anti-Viet Nam war movement was at its peak. I saw a people full
of hope and passion for peace and justice and was infected. I see
young Americans today who still retain these values. There are many
but I will single out someone I have never met - William Rivers
Pitt. He started a website called Truthout.org
that tells you Everything you Wanted to Know about the War on Iraq
but were Afraid to Ask.
He said this in a recent article:
“Our corruption is the absolute triumph of image
over reality, of flash over substance, of the pervasive need within
most Americans to believe in a happy-face version of the nation
they call home, and to spurn the reality of our estate as unpatriotic.”
His statement does not apply only to Americans. Surely
all of us have to put our heads down to the task of respecting the
first principles of democracy. A Free Press. Respect for the whistle
blowers of the world. Finding institutional and legal ways to keep
corporate and militarist interests at bay. Giving space to the voices
of the powerless and the marginalized, the hungry and the dispossessed,
the vilified and those earmarked for massacre. Not for their sake,
as much as for our own.
I will end with an old song and some new images.
Music Video: “Images you didn't see”
(4.30 mins)
For a high resolution, .WMV Windows Media
Player (9.0) format, please
click here to
download the video (.wmv - 13.5 MB)
For a lower resolution, .WMV Windows Media
Player (9.0) format, please click here
to download the video (.wmv stream - 4.09 MB)
©Anand Patwardhan, 16 June 2004
www.patwardhan.com
Footnote: An excerpt from “Cold Turkey”
by Kurt Vonnegut
About my own history of foreign substance abuse…
I've been a coward about heroin and cocaine and LSD and so on, afraid
they might put me over the edge. But I'll tell you one thing: I
once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was
when I got my first driver's license! Look out, world, here comes
Kurt Vonnegut.
And my car back then, a Studebaker, as I recall, was
powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery
today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused
and addictive and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.
When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized
world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon
now there won't be any more of those. Cold turkey. Can I tell you
the truth? I mean this isn't like TV news, is it?
Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts
of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.
And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey,
our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little
is left of what we're hooked on.
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