Reprinting a FOOTNOTE MEMO presented in 2022 ……………………. ………… https://thuppahis.com/2022/04/12/michael-roberts-a-partial-bibliography-1965-1999/
Thank You, MURALI. May I return the compliments IV by telling the world about your honesty in reportage, your bravery in difficult conditions in 2008/09 during the Eelam War in its last stages. It was fortunate for me that we had met briefly at a luncheon in the academic Sanjay Srivastava’s house in New Delhi in 1995. I presume that initial interaction encouraged you to approach me for articles when I arrived in Colombo in mid-April 2009? …. Though the invitation may also have been facilitated by the fact that your boss in THE HINDU and FRONTLINE, the redoubtable N. Ram, had met me briefly then in Delhi and earlier at the ICES in Colombo.
Let me, at this point, tell the world about your courageous and honest reportage on the last stages of Eelam War IV in 2009 and, thereafter, your coverage of the massive & complicated humanitarian operations in sustaining and rehabilitating the roughly 250-280,000 Tamil IDPs in the Vavuniya and Jaffna Peninsula Camps — a set of operations involving complex cooperation between NGOs, INGOs and the SL government’s civil administration and armed forces (this set of operations NOW completely erased in the present political agendas of USA, the UNHRC and other allied agencies).
I need to tell the ‘world’ (i.e. the limited readership of Thuppahi) about your reportage THEN and stress that you, Kanchan Prasad of Prasar Bharathi and the Reuters personnel under Bryson Hull were among the few who did not pursue the weighted and highly partisan –repeat HIGHLY PARTISAN — reportage from the BBC, AP personnel and Gordon Weiss of the UN in Colombo and Frances Harrison in London (to name just a few).
So, now, it is up to me to clarify this response by working up an article on the WORK you and Kanchan did in the first half of 2009 –reiterating the messages in the essays and pictorial reproductions of earlier articles for the benefit of a new generation and/or those with short memories.
My MEMORIES are not ephemeral Murali. Thank you, MURALI …. you can stand beside a Sri Lankan with the same name.
Michael, you are certainly entitled to elegize your departed journalist pal B, Muralidhar Reddy. And also to tag Narasimhan Ram, with an adjective ‘redoubtable’.
I wonder whether you had read and studied the editorials of ‘House of Hindu’ paper on the Sri Lankan issue since 1977. Their brand of journalism is ‘weather-vane journalism’, if I put it mildly. During the Indian agitation for independence, from the first decade of the 20th century until 1948, they were pro-British, and now they find it difficult to post completely all the ‘junk’ they wrote about Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru, in their archives.
Here is an observation from Nehru, in his ‘An Autobiography’ (1936). “The Hindu of Madras is probably the best, so far as get-up and news service are concerned. It always reminds me of an old maiden lady, very prim and proper, who is shocked if a naughty word is used in her presence. It is eminently the paper of the bourgeois, comfortably settled in life. Not for it is the shady side of existence, the rough and tumble and conflict of life.” What Nehru had described 90 years ago, still remains true, even now. And do you think that ‘redoubtable N. Ram’, can rebut Nehru’s view?
If your pal, late Muralidhar Reddy (who was the Colombo correspondent of the Hindu newspaper) had contributed anything significant that deviated from the ‘House of Hindu’s principles of ‘buttering the back muscles of the Powers that be’, I like to be enlightened. Then, I’ll consider him as an ‘intrepid reporter’.