Beheading Britain, shafting Southasia   March 2011

Art: Somalee Banerjee

When I was reporting, Mark was no longer on the daily news beat. He had long since chosen to share his insights through feature-making, books and documentaries. But over the previous decades, through the magic of short-wave radio, in English and Hindi, and in translation in Nepali, Tamil, Pashto, Persian, Urdu and Sinhala, Mark’s words reached tens of millions of people via the many broadcasts of the BBC World Service. 

 

In the same way so did mine, and so did our great colleagues in the BBC Hindi Service, people such as Achala Sharma, Madhukar Upadhyay, Sanjeev Srivastava or Rehaan Fazaal. We were all colleagues-in-arms, intrinsically linked in our devotion to reporting on the region and to the values of the BBC World Service – objectivity, truth, credibility. Our audiences were massive – more than 170 million around the world, 30 to 40 million in this region alone. We built them together, and our cross-lingual cooperation was a model for communal harmony that even M K Gandhi might have admired. ‘To the friendship of English-speaking peoples’ went the motto engraved above the entrance to BBC World Service headquarters at Bush House in London. But to us, it was for the friendship of all who could hear us, in whatever language they understood best. From April 2011, that era ends in Southasia and many other parts of the world. 

 

The announcement of savage budget cuts by the BBC came on India’s Republic Day – an irony that no doubt escaped those wielding the scythe that slashed the Hindi Service and other vernacular broadcasts across Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America. Gone too was news in Serbian, Macedonian, Albanian, English for the West Indies, Portuguese for Africa as well as short-wave service for Nepal, China, Russia, Turkey, Vietnam, Cuba, Ukraine and Azerbaijan. English-language short wave is being drastically cut, AM and medium-wave broadcasts to Europe are going, and various BBC programmes and foreign-language monitoring services will fall to the accountant’s pen – wielded in this case more as a chainsaw. Short-wave radio news in many of the countries losing BBC service will now come from China, the US, Iran, Israel and India – all fine countries, undoubtedly, but have any of them produced a Mark Tully? 

 

Hundreds of my former colleagues will also lose their jobs, meaning the loss of skilled, wise and dedicated people with accumulated centuries of experience in purveying truth to power and to the people. 

 

Soft power silenced

There has been an outpouring of global wrath and dismay, uniting a spectrum of commentators to decry the slashed budgets. In Serbia, a journalist named Milos Vasic told Time magazine how BBC broadcasts in Serbo-Croat had literally saved his life during the bloody dissolution of Yugoslavia and the subsequent barbarism unleashed by Slobodan Milosevic. ‘We are about to lose the gold standard of objectivity and accuracy in radio reporting,’ Vasic said, ‘This will not end well.’ In mid-February, Mark Tully, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, Ram Guha and others called for a restoration of the Hindi short-wave service.

 

Outlook magazine – which is not alone in historically regarding BBC as both journalistic rival and trusted source of information – went to India’s Hindi heartland and heard from bereaved villagers in the feudal regions of eastern Uttar Pradesh. Some were even threatening to burn British Prime Minister David Cameron in effigy. ‘BBC ka naam prachaar ke bajaye khabar ki vishwasneeyata se juda tha’ (the BBC was associated with reliability of news, rather than propaganda), said 62-year-old Sumant Pandiya. He said he could remember listening, spellbound, to honest, unbiased accounts of the 1971 Liberation War as well as the destruction of the Babri Masjid 21 years later.

 

Even the end of the rather neo-imperial-sounding ‘English for the Caribbean’ transmissions is being mourned in West Indian waters. From proudly sovereign Barbados to tiny Montserrat, still clinging to its colonial ties to London despite repeated British offers of independence, local legislators and editors have bemoaned the loss of objective, world and regional news on the BBC. ‘Wall-to-wall American schlock-rock and Christian missionary drivel,’ warned a letter writer to one of Jamaica’s leading newspapers, bemoaning the future of foreign broadcasting to his country. 

 

Similar words of woe and warning have come from Azeri-speakers in Iran and Azerbaijan, as well as Angola, Mozambique, Vietnam and other countries where the BBC cuts have suddenly narrowed people’s choices of news.

 

Why are Britain’s government and the BBC making such cuts at a time when the decline of their country’s economy is matched only by the ongoing slump in its global political role? Since World War II’s devastations at home and abroad, Britain has been slowly and fitfully trying to find a new place for itself in the world. In 1962, the former US secretary of state and one of the key architects of US supremacy in the 20th century, Dean Acheson, severely ruffled starchy British feathers with a speech at West Point. ‘Great Britain’, he said, ‘had lost an Empire and has been searching for a role.’ 

 

Then came the stunning rise of British pop culture. From the Beatles to Brideshead Revisited on TV, British accents took the world by storm. James Bond films, British painting, the radicalism of Tariq Ali and Germaine Greer – all this and more fuelled various levels of global discourse. Governments came to realise the value of ‘soft power’, and the BBC budgets grew accordingly. A short-wave radio broadcaster that began in 1932 as the Empire Service was transformed first into the External Services and, eventually, simply the World Service. 

 

Audiences soared past 100 million, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which funded global broadcasting, were ecstatic. A mid-sized island nation off the coast of France was playing a lead role in global geopolitics and culture, thanks more to words than weapons! That those words were in Hindi, Spanish, Malay and 40 other languages supercharged Britain’s brand image through good times and bad. ‘What else makes us punch so far above our weight in the world,’ asks a former UK diplomat still wary of speaking on the record, ‘if not the World Service, the BBC in general and soft power? It’s a travesty to cut that in any substantive way.’

 

Slashing chunks from a service that many in Britain cannot even hear on the radio has, surprisingly, united usually quarrelsome leftists and right-wingers at the edges of British politics. Kate Chisholm, a crusty conservative (with a small ‘c’) writer who sniffs with disdain at the softies in today’s Tory party, echoes British envoys abroad in arguing that the World Service helps the country to keep its international role. ‘Starve the World Service,’ she warned in a recent edition of The Spectator, ‘and you’ll be risking more than the loss of a few listeners in Tirana [Albania].’

 

Among the socialists, or at least the post-Tony Blair version found in today’s Labour Party, the cuts ignited a mix of political point-scoring and seemingly heartfelt concern for a much-loved institution. Speaking in Parliament, Labour MP Dennis MacShane compared new Foreign Secretary William Hague – credited with spearheading the cuts – to Dear Leader Kim Jong Il or the late Saddam Hussein. ‘You are doing in part what no dictator has ever achieved,’ MacShane thundered. ‘[You are] silencing the voice of the BBC, the voice of Britain, the voice of democracy, the voice of balanced journalism at a time when it is more than ever needed.’

 

Hague has been defending his decisions somewhat less bombastically, but there is no doubt that the issue is dominating his debut as Britain’s chief representative to the world. Rather than enhance his country’s image in some way, he now stands accused of drastically doing it down through his statutory control of the BBC World Service’s purse strings. 

 

In a perverse, peculiarly British way, Foreign Office funding has actually enhanced the World Service’s editorial independence over the years. At periodic intervals, BBC managers would sit down with senior mandarins at the imposing building on London’s Whitehall, where British foreign policy is drawn up. Scrupulously, say insiders, diplomats mostly avoided attempts to steer coverage. For their part, the BBC types were largely deaf to editorial input , and just made the case for steady increases in budget. That remained within the government’s purview, as did the list of languages in which news should be broadcast. Over the decades, this strange pas-de-deux isolated the World Service from the parochial concerns of internal BBC politics, and kept broadcasters and the Foreign Office focused firmly on providing credible, accurate news to the world, whatever the demands of the home audience. 

 

Cutting namkeen

Sadly, more pitfalls lie ahead. Little noticed last year when David Cameron’s newly elected coalition began hacking away at public spending was a decision that ends the longstanding arrangement between the government and BBC, and makes the latter largely responsible for funding the World Service from its own revenues. That is a set-up that is bound to lead to even more cuts and damage to the language services, as cash-strapped programme makers choose between reality shows, situation comedies and news broadcasts that might be essential to Tamils and Iranians but matter not a whit in Little Britain. 

 

BBC staffers past and present are fighting hard to reverse or mitigate the cuts. To save what might seem in the West to be an anachronistic service, a crackly foreign-language broadcast on shortwave radio, one can join Facebook, which currently sports an SOS World Service page with nearly 10,000 followers, sign an ‘ePetition’ sent to David Cameron with a similar number of signatures obtained at the click of a mouse, and e-mail submissions to the British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee. 

 

To many of us who have worked in and loved the Southasia region for much of our adult lives, the biggest losses are the axing of the Hindi and Nepali shortwave services. It is hard to see why this is happening. Taken together, the two cost just over USD 1.5 million a year – peanuts, or perhaps more accurately, namkeen in the overall scheme of things. 

 

Former Hindi Service head Sam Miller, now resident in Delhi, has travelled widely across the North Indian Hindi belt, where 10 million people are about to lose their last remaining independent source of radio news. Before he left the BBC to become a freelance writer and consultant several years ago, Miller also hired many of the journalists, producers and technicians who will lose their jobs if the cuts go ahead. He is now blogging, writing letters and networking furiously to convince the British government to change its mind and invest the relatively paltry sum of money required to keep those short-wave radios crackling from Pratapgarh in UP to Pyuthan in western Nepal. 

 

Miller warns that it is the ordinary listener – the farmer, bazaari or village seamstress, the aam aadmi so esteemed in the political rhetoric of both countries – that is losing a trusted source of news. ‘It was the huge audiences of the Hindi Service that played the main role in giving the BBC its reputation,’ he says. ‘This is why the BBC and Mark Tully and so many others remain household names even in some of the most undeveloped parts of Southasia.’ 

 

--Daniel Lak has reported for the BBC from every country in Southasia, including most recently in Nepal between 2000 and 2004.