It was around 5 pm on Saturday. I was in office, getting set to go out for a smoke after checking the agency copies and staff stories on mail, when the chat box on gmail pinged open. It was Wife. And she threw the bombshell unusually quietly. J Dey killed.
Who? What?
A few more question marks would have gone there, and as I was getting set to tap in some expletives came another message: J Dey… Mid Day.
I had connected by then. Dey’s is too big a name in the world of newspapering to not know; it’s not expected of anyone who has lived and worked in the media industry in Mumbai. I knew him just about enough to know a man of his stature — both professionally and physically, for the man was big, real big — could ALSO be so quiet, unassuming and humble.
I needed two cigarettes to get over the initial shock.
Shot point blank at 3.30 on a weekend afternoon near Hiranandani in upscale Powai? You got to be joking.
No, said the news reports trickling, soon flooding in, on the Web.
But a journalist gunned down in the middle of India’s most famous metropolis is something that I have not heard of in about a dozen years in the profession. We have heard of whistleblowers, witnesses, informers killed in cold blood. Not journalists.
As professionals of the fourth estate, cushioned in our corporate-style office cubicles and crooning about pretty, petty discomforts of our daily life, we had somehow come to think of ourselves as unreachable. And in Manmohan’s maha-liberal India, we, the media, had suddenly come of life: we bought (allegedly), sold (purportedly) and retold (factually) information that passes as news; and a few bigger and bolder among us indulged in tele-talk with Radia Inc.
But we, all of us as fellow members of the tribe led by the bigger and bolder ‘gatekeepers of democracy’, had gained that pretty notoriety that allowed us to wear a halo and be social butterflies, the ones — the social circle beginning from your poor country cousins unfortunate enough to be doing other, less glamorous jobs and going all the way to corporate, political and bureaucratic boardrooms, if not bedrooms.
We did not foresee danger because none existed. Who would want to waste bullets on social butterflies, with most not even worth the extortion amount? Worse, who would tolerate all that eulogistic and self-applauding hot air on TV news?
We were safe, sound, hale, hearty, happy and whining about how a former colleague got a new job offer on a platter and bought a new red sedan.
And then it takes a few bullets pumped into a fellow journalist in “broad daylight” — that’s how newspapers report anyone killed during the day; though I am yet to come across emaciated daylight, and am not sure whether the sun was even peeking out on Powai at the time, the way it was raining in Mumbai on Saturday — to shoot straight through our veneer of halo.
If they could shoot Dey for breaking a story on oil mafia can they be far from those who blew the cover off, say, the con called Commonwealth Games? In an inverted way, can they come gunning for those involved in the 2G scam, if only to eliminate witnesses? Or do the sharp-suited bad guys in telecom industry have more sense, sensibility, suave and polish than petty oil mafia members and ungainly underworld types?
With governments both in Mumbai and New Delhi involved with prettiness of other kinds, the police busy protecting netas, their bachchas, starlets and Babas of all ilk, and the media smug in its own smugness, this had to come sooner or later. The bad guys haven’t had a free run for a while, so they had to come up eventually in the circle of life.
The question is how far our state, media and conceited national psyche of smugness allow the malaise to spread.
Will we sit up and take note of the real and present danger? It’s general failure of law and order, not vendetta, as the media would certainly play it out to be. It’s easier that way, gives more drama, and you can be in cahoots with the ruling alliance. For, the media will have more column inches to fill and more film reels to cut if they go after law and order situation, and lose out on being in quite a few good books in the process.
It’s not a question of one journalist shot, or lawless, gun-totting Maoists ruling the roost in large swaths of the land. It’s the brazen nature of those gunshots that should ring the alarm bells. It’s scary, very scary.
As J Dey, mentor to innumerable young crime reporters in Mumbai, wrote for Mid Day almost this time last year, “When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber… The adage is especially apt when it comes to controlling crime in the city. The eagles — encounter specialists — have been silent for far too long. The parrots, or the criminals, have not only begun jabbering but are also flying without fear. Their flight can be seen in the spiraling crime graph…”
Shot point blank at 3.30 on a weekend afternoon near Hiranandani in upscale Powai? You got to be joking.
No, Dey would have written.
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