A reader responded to my last column on Indian journalism with a comment I want to address directly — not in a reply box that disappears but in a column that stays.
He wrote that the core of my being, my soul, knows that I do not believe in Sarve Bhavantu Sukhinah. He suggested I opened my eyes only in 2014. He pointed out that Congress-era journalism was Darbari — court journalism for the Gandhi family. He noted that left-liberal journalists are ideological, manipulative, and deceitful. He closed by offering me a lesson — Satyameva Jayate. Truth alone triumphs.
I want to thank him. Genuinely. Not sarcastically. He raised legitimate points that the original column did not fully address. And he deserves a complete answer.
But I also want to name what his comment actually did — because naming it is part of the answer.
He did not engage with the argument. He questioned the arguer. He did not say my facts were wrong. He said my soul was insincere. He did not challenge my analysis of media capture. He implied that a Muslim man quoting a Sanskrit prayer is performing — that the core of his being cannot authentically invoke a civilization that predates every religion that currently fights over it.
This is the deflection that has replaced debate in Indian public life. When you cannot answer the argument — question the identity of the person making it. When you cannot refute the facts — suggest the facts are motivated by religion, by politics, by something other than the honest pursuit of truth.
I will not accept that deflection. But I will accept the legitimate challenge buried inside it.
He is right that my column did not go back far enough. So let us go back. All the way. Let us have the full truth — Satyameva Jayate — since that is what he asked for.
Indian journalism’s relationship with power did not begin in 2014. It did not begin with Arnab Goswami or the Adani acquisition of NDTV. It began, if we are being completely honest, almost at the moment of independence itself.
The Congress party that inherited India in 1947 also inherited the colonial government’s understanding of press management. The difference was sophistication. The British used censorship and sedition laws bluntly. Congress used access, advertising, and proximity more elegantly. The result was a press that was, for most of the first three decades of independence, broadly supportive of the ruling establishment — not through coercion but through the culture of Lutyens proximity. Editors who had lunch with ministers. Journalists who understood that criticism had limits. Publications that depended on government advertising for survival.
This is what my reader calls Darbari media for Khangress. He is not wrong.
READ: Sarve bhavantu sukhinah — And what Indian Journalism did with it (June 6, 2026)
The Emergency of 1975 made explicit what had been implicit. Indira Gandhi suspended democracy, censored the press, jailed editors, and expected compliance. Most of the press complied. LK Advani’s famous line — you were asked to bend, you chose to crawl — was addressed to journalists who surrendered without being pushed. The Indian Express under Ramnath Goenka resisted. Most others did not.
After the Emergency, a generation of genuinely brave journalists emerged — shaped by the experience of censorship, committed to the idea that the press existed to hold power accountable. Kuldeep Nayar. Arun Shourie. Prabhash Joshi. These were not Congress journalists or BJP journalists. They were journalists. That tradition was real and it was honorable.
But underneath it, the structural dependency never changed. Publications needed government advertising. Editors needed access. Journalists needed sources. The relationship between press and power was never cleanly separated — because the economics of Indian media never permitted that separation.
The paid news scandal of 2009 and 2010 — documented by the Press Council of India under Congress governance — showed how far the corruption had gone. Politicians paying newspapers for favorable coverage presented as editorial content. Not in a few marginal publications. Systematically. Across the industry. During elections. Under a Congress government that was informed, investigated, and took no meaningful action.
This happened before 2014. This was Congress-era media corruption. My reader is right to raise it. My column should have said this more completely. I am saying it now.
Urdu media — since he mentioned it — has had its own failures. Let us be honest about those too.
Urdu journalism in India has, at various points, served as the political arm of Muslim political parties rather than as independent journalism. It has amplified communal narratives. It has presented Muslim political leadership uncritically — the same sycophancy it accused the Hindi press of practicing toward Congress. It has sometimes prioritized community sentiment over factual reporting. These are real failures and they belong in any honest account of Indian media’s decline.
Left-liberal journalists — since he raised them — include both genuine truth-tellers and ideological operators. The Wire retracted a story about Amit Shah and Facebook that could not be verified. Some journalists in the liberal ecosystem have made claims that collapsed under scrutiny. Ideology masquerading as journalism exists on the left as surely as it exists on the right. My reader is not wrong about this either.
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So here is the full picture that my original column compressed into the Babri Masjid moment — which was real and remains the turning point — but which has roots going back decades:
1947 to 1975 — Darbari journalism for Congress. Not coerced. Chosen. The culture of proximity to power.
1975 to 1977 — Emergency. The press that crawled. And the press that did not.
1977 to 2000 — The golden generation of Indian journalism. Imperfect but genuinely trying. Bofors. Hawala. Tehelka. Real accountability journalism producing real consequences.
1992 — Babri Masjid. The communal content market created. The ratings discovery that changed everything.
2000 to 2014 — The corporate capture. Paid news. Advertising dependency. The slow death of editorial independence under Congress governance that the left-liberal ecosystem rarely acknowledges.
2014 to present — The acceleration. BJP-era consolidation of what Congress-era corruption had already weakened. Faster. More systematic. More complete.
The decline did not begin in 2014. 2014 inherited a press that was already compromised. What changed after 2014 was the speed and completeness of the capture — and the addition of the communal content economy at industrial scale.
Now let me address the core of my reader’s challenge directly.
He suggests that I — a Muslim man — cannot sincerely invoke Sarve Bhavantu Sukhinah. That the prayer is somehow not mine to quote. That my soul knows it is performance.
This is the argument I reject most completely. Not because it is rude — it is not particularly rude. But because it is precisely the kind of thinking that deteriorated journalism has produced in India over thirty years of communal content.
The idea that Sarve Bhavantu Sukhinah belongs to one community. That a Muslim cannot mean it when he says it. That the civilizational inheritance of the subcontinent is the property of one religion rather than the shared heritage of every person born on this soil.
This idea — that India’s ancient wisdom is Hindu property rather than human property — is not Hinduism. It is the corruption of Hinduism by the same communal media economy my column was critiquing. The Upanishads were not written for one community. The prayer asking that all beings be happy — all beings, without exception — was not composed with asterisks. May all beings be happy — except Muslims. May all be free from illness — except those who pray differently. The prayer contains no such exclusion. The exclusion was added later. By politics. By media. By the thirty-year communal economy that my reader and I both, I believe, want to see ended.
I quoted Sarve Bhavantu Sukhinah not as a Hindu borrowing a Hindu prayer. I quoted it as an Indian reclaiming a civilizational inheritance that belongs to every person on this land.
READ: The truth does change with a headline, Byju (May 27, 2026)
My reader offers Satyameva Jayate as a corrective. I accept it completely. Truth alone triumphs. So let us have all of it — the Congress-era Darbari journalism, the Emergency crawlers, the paid news scandal, the Urdu media’s failures, the left-liberal ideologues — and let us have the post-2014 acceleration, the Adani-NDTV acquisition, the Republic TV model, the communal content economy, the 159th press freedom ranking.
All of it. The full truth. From every direction.
That is what Satyameva Jayate demands.
And here is why it matters beyond an argument between a columnist and a reader.
Deteriorated journalism is not a problem for one community. It is not a problem for Muslims or for Hindus or for liberals or for conservatives. It is a problem for the Constitution of India — which requires an informed citizenry to function, which depends on a free press to hold power accountable, which cannot survive the sustained manufacture of ignorance and fear that thirty years of communal content economy has produced.
When journalism fails — the Constitution’s enforcement mechanism fails with it. Not because the Constitution changes. Because the citizens who must defend it have been fed a diet of fear and pride for so long that they no longer recognize what they are losing.
This is not a Muslim concern. It is not a Hindu concern. It is an Indian concern.
Sarve Bhavantu Sukhinah — may all beings be happy.
Satyameva Jayate — truth alone triumphs.
These are not competing prayers. They are the same prayer said twice.
The first tells us what we want.
The second tells us how to get there.
I believe in both. My column was written in service of both. And I am grateful to this reader for pushing me to say so more completely.