5 minutes reading time
Not too long ago was my old crush's birthday.
I was sitting in my room, clicking through old folders, and found an image of a birthday card I made for her a few years back to send to her college. The funny thing is I barely even spoke to her during school. Later on, around 2010 or 2011, we somehow started texting heavily for a year or so. Nothing scandalous or raunchy. Just endless texts back and forth until the whole thing fizzled out into silence. But silly me still had passwords with combinations of her name and numbers. I don't even know why I picked those strings. Inertia, mostly.
While I was looking through those old account exports and bookmarks, I ran straight into an article I saved years ago.
The second I opened the tab, I remembered why I wanted to delete it. It came out back in 2013, but why the hell does it still get me this worked up three years later? It has been rattling inside my skull for three days straight.
The piece was from March 2013 on Newslaundry, written by Anand Ranganathan. The headline was P. Sainath: The Anti-Mahatma?
I remember the first time I read it, I felt this hot wave of irritation in my chest. Reading it again years later didn't help.
The entire premise is built on this theatrical provocation: P. Sainath reports on rural distress and farmer suicides with devastating accuracy, but journalism itself is morally insufficient. Ranganathan drags Gandhi into the picture, framing Gandhi as the reporter who had the guts to "jump the line" from observing misery to actively leading people. Then he turns around and points a finger at Sainath:
"Stand up, Sainath. Jump that line!"
He basically accuses Sainath of being a mere "chronicler." He quotes the suicide numbers going up from 10,720 in 1995 to nearly 16,000 in 2010, and lays that trajectory right at the feet of the reporting, as if the documentation failed because it didn't magically stop the agrarian crisis.
At first, you read that and think it's just pure ragebait designed to farm angry clicks from people who admire Sainath's reporting. But then you look at how carefully he writes it. He explicitly goes out of his way to insist he is not joking: "My argument, I understand only too well, is harsh... I am not going to stop now."
He actually believes it. He genuinely sat at a desk, typed that out, and thought he had uncovered a profound ethical dilemma. He might have.
But still I wanna ask, "What the fuck is this logic?"
Why does Indian public discourse have this diseased, desperate need for saviors?
Sainath never claimed to be a politician. He never stood on a podium asking people to worship him or vote for him. He is a reporter. He took a notebook, a camera, and a pair of dusty chappals, and walked into districts where people were drinking pesticide because drought and debt broke them. He documented the collapse of rural livelihoods while the mainstream English press in Delhi and Bombay was busy writing full-page spreads about fashion weeks and Sensex highs.
That work matters precisely because it is journalism. It is meticulous, unvarnished, and independent.
The moment a journalist drops the notebook to "organise the masses" and launch a political agitation, they become an activist or a politician. Which is fine if that's what someone wants to do with their life. But once you do that, you are playing a completely different game with party lines, compromises, cadre management, and electoral math. Who the fuck stays behind in the fields to document the reality without a party flag in their hands?
Ranganathan looked at a man doing one vital, gruelling job better than anyone else in the entire country, and decided to call him out for not being an entirely different person.
I think what pisses me off the most is the casual arrogance of it.
It costs nothing to sit in an air-conditioned room and demand heroic martyrdom from someone else. It costs nothing to write dramatic sentences about jumping lines while someone else spends decades on state transport buses talking to widows who can't afford kerosene.
We have an entire political culture built on looking for a single strongman, a Mahatma, a messiah to come and sweep away all our filth so we don't have to think about institutional failure or our own complicity. And when someone refuses that messiah complex and just does the unglamorous groundwork of telling the truth, the commentariat attacks them for not performing the savior role they never asked for.
Sainath showed us the bodies. He showed us the water mafias, the seed cartels, the silent women working twelve hours in the sun.
If nothing changed, that's not because Sainath didn't become Gandhi. That's on the state. That's on fucking me and you. I did nothing. Just going to some protests with AIKS, CPIM and SFI isn't enough. That's on me, not on Sainath. And on you too.
I should delete the bookmark and get back to work. I have to wake up at 2 AM cuz Australians need someone to answer when their banking system has issues. My head hurts. Might take leave tomorrow.
Image Credit: Don Quixote Reading by Honoré Daumier (1865–1867) via Wikimedia Commons