Q: Is democracy in crisis, is the threat multifold in today’s India?

A: Yes it is. Their priority is different. See the irony. You have come to power through democracy and you don’t believe in it. Being in power, you have to fight inequality, but you believe in it. Your foundation of principles is in support of inequality, so you are not going to do any damn thing about it. We should never forget the lens of caste, as from here inequality and injustice percolate in the society. That’s why they are not going to do anything to eradicate the most barbaric and cruel practice of manual scavenging. That is not the priority. It can take Rs 3 lakh to rehabilitate a manual scavenger. And if the number of safai karmacharis is estimated around 3,00,000, with Rs 9,000 crore, you can eliminate the most criminal occupation that anyone in human history could have imposed on another person. This much you have given to Vijay Mallya. Around Rs 67,000 crore are lying unused in the SC-ST sub plan. So, it is clear you don’t do it because you don’t want to do it. This is not your priority.

Q: Has rising inequality become the now acceptable norm?

A: Equality and inequality are barometers to study the state of the Indian democracy. The rise of socio-religious fundamentalism, rise of economic and market fundamentalism and the spectacular rise of inequality in India, all of these three have taken place at same time. Inequality has grown in India faster than any country of the world. The top one per cent of the Indian population holds more wealth than top one per cent of the American population. It is policy-based inequality. we have to look into this alliance. Inequality undermines and endangers democracy.

Q: How do you see reflections of this in the media?

A: Media comes here in a big way. Every major publisher, media house, every second editor has his own favourite Baba, some godman, We can see the amount of legitimisation and space that are being given to these spiritual corporations. They are spiritual Mallyas. So media is also part and parcel of this phenomenon in the society which is dangerous for democracy.

Q: What’s your take on the media vis-a-vis the political scenario?

A: Both the political world and the media are at their worst and lowest that I have ever seen. I have never seen such scumbags in the media as in the last three to four years. Even during political Emergency, I haven’t seen the atmosphere of intellectual intimidation, harassment and fear that exists today on our campuses and among journalists, etc. Because this is a regime that is managed to create a greater fear than that exists. I was a student union leader during Emergency days. Of course, we were scared but it was not half as scary as the situation that exists today. I have never seen such an atmosphere of intellectual intimidation, bullying and and the the media being used. In those days, hundreds of journalists were arrested. Some were destroyed, others had lost their jobs. Few newspapers like Rajasthan Patrika carried blank editorials to protest again Emergency. Today, you have channels whose existence seems dedicated to the cult of Mr Modi. They don’t have anything to do except bark and bite those they see as their enemies and challenges. I cannot recognise the media of twenty years ago from what it has become today. And this is not just true for any journalist but also holds for very senior journalists and the owners of the media houses. I cannot understand the difference between now and say 25 years ago. Today, whichever government is in power, is busy parcelling out the country to corporate bodies. The resources of the country is being divided amongst corporations. The biggest beneficiaries of this process are media owners. They are the richest Indians, they are the biggest corporates. The richest Indian and the biggest media owner is Mukesh Ambani. These guys are beneficiaries of whatever privatisation the government undertakes today. If you take the spectrum as a case, Tatas, Birlas, Ambanis, they are all in the spectrum. If you privatise oil and gas, there is a fight between two brothers.

They are the biggest media owners or the biggest influencers of media. Everybody made Radia tapes as if it was the issue of corrupt journalists. I never thought that was the case, I never looked the case in that way. The journalists were comedians in that whole thing. What the Radia tape really showed you was that a bunch of five or six corporate leaders could decide the composition of the Union Cabinet of India. It showed us who runs India.

Q: You have been running PARI (People’s Archive of Rural India) for quite some time now. Do you find any effect of PARI on the mainstream media?

A: Yes, all the big newspapers are seeking to reproduce our stories. Some of them are contacting our authors to do the same story differently. Arpita did a story on a group of villages entirely filled with women because in Uttrakhand men have joined the Army or migrated to become security guards in Delhi. They have been fighting for 20 to 30 years to get a post office in that remote place. The problem is so acute because they are dependent on the money order to run their households. They have to go to the next region and district to receive that money order. Young men looking for job interviews, get their interview letters days after the interview has been conducted. We published this story, it really went viral. Senior journalists like Rajdeep Sardesai retweeted it. Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad saw it and in the next 48 hours, that village got a post office. What had not happened in 50 years, happened in 48 hours. We have done a follow-up story on the post office. Government departments are reaching out to us, asking whether they can partner with us in things like teaching photography, doing a workshop with people from marginalised sections, etc.

Q: How do you see PARI’s journey over the last three years?

A: I am very proud of the kind of website we have put up, the quality of the material we have put up. It’s been just 36 months. We are small, but we have expanded at a very rapid pace. By the end of the year, we will have clocked nearly 2 million page views, we are already at 1.7 million. Over 60 per cent of our visitors are in the age group of 18 to 34 years. Within that, half or so are in the age group of 18 to 24 years and the single largest group spending the most time on PARI are young women.

Q: So, the young generation is getting attracted towards PARI?

A: Yes, the young generation is firmly with PARI. And there is something which is very counterintuitive also. If you look around, people say that the industry standard for a good page session is two to three minutes. The page session of the young women on PARI in the age group of 18 to 24 years is 4 minutes 34 seconds, which is way above the industry standard. One reason for that is a lot of content on PARI is created by women of that age group.

Q: So, is there a gender tilt here?

A: Yes, more than two-third of our fellows are women. There is only one male who is a tech editor as a full timer in the PARI office. The numbers of requests we get for internships are also very high. We are getting 3 to 4 a week. That’s the plus side. We have published 107 distinct authors out of which 60 per cent are women. Out of some 200 photographers, 60 per cent are women.

Q: How difficult is it to sustain such an effort?

A: We don’t take money from governments and corporations. But we are fully willing to do work with them if it benefits them. We will not take anything from them. But we can work with them so that the women who are trained in photography would get a place to exhibit their photography. The other thing is that out of these 36 months, in the last 24 months, PARI has won 8 awards. The last was in October. In two years, 8 awards for a website that came out of nowhere is a huge achievement.

Q: Do you think that PARI has been able to bring about a shift in the reading habits of people or the publishing habits of corporate-led media?

A: Ultimately the corporate media will function for the corporates. It’s called capitalism, that is something we are not about to transform through a website. That can be changed from the process of mass movements, struggles. When people decide they want a more equal, equitable, egalitarian society, they will change that. But we can’t change the soul of corporate media. However, we can, and we do influence them. After we have come into being, several other websites have got sensitive to the idea of appearing in Indian languages. There are articles and follow ups of the stories we do. That is why a large number of newspapers and journals are reproducing PARI with attribution. I would actually prefer to call them the corporate media and not the mainstream media. They are a very elitist media. To call them mainstream is to say that everybody is only reading about Katrina Kaif and Salman Khan. They are the big corporate media, they have the power and reach which we cannot dream of at this point. So, we tried to reach their audience and many of them are happy to pick up our material because it can be done for free. We are a non-profitable organisation. If people want to donate money to us they can. But for reproducing our material, they need our permission, they need our permission to carry our logo and carry our attribution line. If they do that, then it’s free.