Notes of a footnote :
Agreed!! Journalism is literature & history written in a great hurry.
English poet-cum-critic Matthew Arnold (1822 - 1888) came up with a quotable
quote: "Journalism is literature in a hurry" nearly one and a half
century ago. But we – wordsmiths in journalism world over -- have improved upon
the quote to involve history as well. Given the journalists' contribution to
the documentation of world history during the last two centuries, it is now a
generally accepted fact that `journalism is history written in great hurry'.
Literature and history apart, I am mainly concerned with journalism. And that
too—UNI – of which I have been a part for the last about three decades. And my
objectivity over UNI shall always remain a suspect as after 'reinventing '
myself with it I have started calling it my first love with my spouse unwillingly
acknowledging it and close friends know it well what I mean when I try to sing
Faiz's poems with a blunt modification.
MUJH SE MERI PEHLI MOHHABAT
MERE
MEHMOOB NAA MAANG .................
and
GAR
BAAZI UNI KI BAAZZI HAI ,
JO CHAAHO LAGA TO DAR KAISA ,
GAR JEET GAYE TO KYA KEHNA
HAARE BHI TO BAAZI MAAT NAHIN..............
Though there had been speculation in the
organisational circles for some time that media baron Subhash Chandra had been
eyeing for stakes in UNI, a journalist friend of mine from Delhi who had happened to meet the then Railway
Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav came up with a shocker on that early but lazy
morning of September 7, 2006.
I knew for sure that the information handed to me by my friend was authentic.
And I had to act in some way. As is the essence of journalism in general and a
news agency in particular that stresses on the need for disseminating
information (read news) as quickly as possible, I stuck to basics. I lost no
time in sending the following SMS to nearly 100 UNI employees, including its
General Manager Mr M K Laul and other journalists all over the country at 1033
hrs the same day from my mobile phone number 9892016228: "Essel group
of Subhash Chandra acquires 60 % stakes of UNI. Lalu Yadav, whose party has Company Affairs
Ministry confirmed to us today. cpjha
Even I had not realised at that point of time as to what would befall us in the months
to come, I started getting feedbacks by the trickle. One of the early comments
was:" CP is in great hurry ", made by a person, not close to me,
during the usual ' drinks hours ' , the same evening of September 7, 2006, at the UNI Head Office
at 9, Rafi Marg in New Delhi.
A fact I realized only later, my SMS created
ripples both within the organisation and among those who either acquired or
failed in acquiring stakes in UNI. To my comfort, the very next morning Subhash
Chandra himself went on record in DNA, a Mumbai-based daily newspaper in which
he has financial stakes, that he had indeed acquired stakes in UNI. Several
other papers also reported news about the acquisition of stakes by Subhash
Chandra in UNI.
Suddenly, the dynamics of those in the
existing management of UNI changed, with them working to the dictates of
Chandra. Some of us like my comrades in arms for many years, the then Working
President of the UNI Employees Federation Sardar Jaspal Singh Sidhu, the then General
Secretary (Head Office) Rajesh Kumar and fellow journalist Anil Chamaria took
stock of the situation and realised that acquisition of UNI was not in the
interest of employees nor would it help the cause for which the organisation
came to be established way back in March 1961. Fortunately for us, most of the
other employees' unions, including those in Delhi, Mumbai, Kerala, Bihar,
Madhya Pradesh and Chandigarh
also joined hands with us. United then we were, we built up resistance to the
`all-set' acquisition of UNI. We took no time in forming a Joint Action
Committee (JAC) at our Head Office in New
Delhi and held public meetings simultaneously in
political capital, Delhi
and financial capital, Mumbai on September 15, 2006 to chart out our future course of
actions.
As
was the need of the hour, we knocked all doors – be it that of different
ministries of the Government, leaders of various political parties, trade union
leaders, social activists, media persons, artists, teachers & students,
judicial activists and conscientious citizens from different walks of life
– seeking their involvement in our struggle against efforts by vested interests
to take over UNI and nullify for good the objective that it came to be set up
and the provisions of section 25 of the Company Act that it falls
under.
What
most of us within the organisation realise – some of those close to the ruling
classes may not agree– that UNI had never witnessed the kind of agitation that
it is witnessing now, in its 45-year-long history. Uniqueness of this agitation
was that we could not only forge the maximum possible unity among us
forgetting all of our past petty differences but also made a firm resolve not
to hamper the usual work. Even the management had to concede this fact, in its
Board meeting held on November
9, 2006 that " Despite the continuing agitation , we have
moved stories in good time and there have been no misses during the period
September-October, 2006”.
The
experiences we had undergone over a couple of years – that saw us set up our
own ‘blog’ , perhaps the first trade union blog , to inform employees and friends of UNI of the happenings within the
organization and the nature of efforts made by the interested ones to acquire
stakes in it. Retrospectively speaking, the setting up of a blog became
extremely useful in taking our struggle against anti-Chandra's
acquisition efforts to a level which, I am confident, history will
applaud as a much-needed exercise to prevent somebody from robbing the objective
for which UNI came to be set up.
I
may have contributed my bit in my capacity as the then general secretary of the UNI
Employees Federation and the UNI Employees Union, Mumbai as well, by running blog which had become essential for a situation we were in, and also being
a part and parcel of the decision-making body in joint action committee set up
to take decisions to handle the Subhash Chandra unleashed crisis. But, my
colleagues in the employees' union in Delhi
played even a bigger part by mobilising support of almost all political parties
from the extreme left to the extreme right.
We
firmly believed that information is power and the faster we could act on it
chances of winning get better and so we devised all possible means to make optimum
use of recent tools of information
technology to our advantage. The blog was top of them, as it cost us nothing
but served as an effective medium of interaction among the members of the JAC
and employees spread all over the country. We ensured that all employees
expressed themselves freely. So much so that we even carried "voices of
dissent" on our blog.
That
was not all. We also compiled an all India list of e-mail Ids of the UNI
employees and the concerned citizens, by segregating them into four distinct
categories to share as much information as possible with employees and others
concerned. At the same time, we held back certain information as to the future
moves and strategy so as not to send out signals to our enemies inside and
outside the organisation. Till date, the UNI management has not compiled
such a master representative list of e-mail Ids and even Mr Subhash Chandra had
to use the list of same recipients, beginning from me and ending with the email
ID of top leaders of the political parties, including the then CPM General Secretary
Prakash Karart. When the first and so far the last email sent to the UNI
employees by Mr Subhash Chandra from the UNI Head Office on October 3, 2006
reached to the personal Computer of UNI Regional Manager (Mumbai) Mr Surinder
Arora, he thought it was a communication sent to the employees only
through managers and therefore not only ordered it to be put up on the office
notice boards but also engaged into 'copy and paste' work to transmit it on our
internal tele-printer lines. It was only when I told him that the email has
been sent to all those figuring in my list -- comprising more than one hundred
staff members of the UNI and even those who are not the employees of UNI,
including Mr Karat-- that the manager in Mumbai could sense the situation and
control his joy to have a ride with 'his' supreme master.
Trying
to be more loyal to king than king himself, Mr Arora surreptitiously took
away the hard disk of the PC in the office, almost reserved for me, to Delhi so as to enable the
management to find out there my 'secrets’. I do not know how many pages were
printed in Delhi from that hard disc but I can bet they could not get any clue
about my secrets as I had started working on PC and Internet almost immediately
after it was introduced in India and therefore can say with all the command
that shared computers are never personal computers. I have heard about
interesting episodes of corporate war and allied espionage and feel sorry for
not giving chance to the management to know my secrets.
Talking
about the technology, I must thank the Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited, which
had started charging calls between Delhi
and Mumbai at local rates. It further enabled me to talk to my leaders in Delhi in details at
nominal rates and review the unfolding developments and set out our agenda for
the day. Increasingly cheaper mobile telephony and SMSing also added to our
repertoire of tools of communication.
We
also improvised our forms of agitation and blended Gandhian tools of agitation
like `satyagraha' and fast-unto-death with militant forms of agitation.
While my colleagues in Delhi
went on `satyagraha' from mid September and making Gandhi Cap as their
headgear, I went on fast-unto-death in the first week of November. When Com.
Karat visited at UNI, Bandra, where I was on fast, I explained to him the
efficacy of going on fast. On his part, Com Karat asked to take care of my
health and advised me to resort to other forms of agitations.
Now
I can tell the world that this 6-day fast with only bottled water and lemon
gave me and my family member’s tremendous moral strength. So much so that when
I went to home on the night of November 6, 2006 to bring certain papers to file
complaint in the Industrial Court, Mumbai, against my transfer , my wife refused
to give me food despite my son's insistence to share freshly made kheer with me. "Papa, they are cheating you. But you are not eating even in the confines of
home" , my son said and I hurriedly left home to be back on fast without
even a cup of tea which was offered to me by my wife.
Like I said before, in between September 7, 2006 and now,
so many things have happened. The events concern all of us in UNI and those who
believe in democracy in the country. As I make an effort to recount UNI's
history now, it is essential to make
aware of the situation currently faced by my organiasation to just not the
nation but a world that believes in democracy.
.
With the nomenclature, UNI, comes journalism and history as well. To justify my
earlier point, I quote the recorded history about UNI as reported by the
Indian Express in its New Delhi
edition of March 22, 1961.
"New Delhi, March 21: The
United News of India, the new news agency, has started its service from today.
This agency, which has been sponsored by leading newspapers of India in
accordance with accepted news agency principles, is intended to fill the void
in the news agency field by the closure of the United Press of India by the end
of 1958.The agency has acquired the right to issue the world service of
Associated Press, the oldest and the largest among international news agencies.
Dr. Keskar, Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting in the course of a
message sent on the occasion of the inauguration of the news agency's service,
says:" There is need in this country for competent news agencies which
will furnish news in an objective and authentic manner to all its subscribing
newspapers". He has expressed the hope that the agency will keep to the
high traditions of journalism and earn a name for itself.
Given that I have been a part of journalism in general and UNI since 1986, I
have long considered it is my duty to put down my thoughts on paper. The idea
to write 'History of UNI " came to me in Lucknow in 1996 when I was
entrusted the task to hold 7th All India Congress of UNI Employees
Federation. I did discuss the idea briefly with the than General Manager of UNI,
Mr Virender Mohan who disclosed to me: "The Board has authorised me to
write the History of UNI". In a way, the then UNI GM had subtly
told me that I better not attempt writing an "official history" of
UNI.
So
I decided then that if ever I write History of UNI it would not be 'official '
one. As many of us know, Dan Brown has put it aptly in his fictionalized'
history `The Da
Vinci Code' that hitherto written histories have largely
been the story of the rulers and not the ruled ones. Knowing full well
where UNI stood at that point in time, I had pre-decided then the title of my
book – whenever it would get printed – would be: " History of UNI ,Back to
Future", which would dwell on the aims and objectives of the news agency.
And it did not take long for me to grasp the mantra to march ahead seriously
with my professional work in UNI, even while plunging headlong into the trade
union movement within the organization.
Unlike
another celebrated American author Thomas L Friedman, best known for
his book , The World Is Flat that is considered by many Indians as an Americanized perception of globalisation, I didn't utter to my
sleeping wife "Honey! The World is flat!! Yet I discovered my mantra and along with comrades in
arms , realised that the mantra was
conceived at the time of birth of the UNI and we have to just co-relate
it to the new situations with tactical repositioning and a long-term strategy to realise our old slogan , " UNI is
ours, we shall fight we shall win" . A larger consensus evolved among the
employees of the UNI and those in the political and civil society domain
of the country that UNI is essential to save freedom of the press and democracy
in the country.
After the UNI surged back to pre-Subhash Chandra rule, many of
us were of the firm view that we may go ahead on the basis of what we had in UNI
at its birth amid the Nehruvian era of socialistic pattern of economy marked
with thrust on public sector and due encouragement to cooperative movements.
The UNI too, was born basically as a multi-state cooperative. But the
captains of ' new economy' in India do not have much faith in the cooperative movements despite the great
success of the fertiliser giant IFFCO and Gujarat Cooperative
Milk Marketing Federation Ltd. (GCMMF), better known as makers
of Amul - the taste of India.
When I first attempted to write the history of UNI the canvass was
very small as the UNI, for me then was `you and I' that primarily meant the
employees of the organization and I, and in a larger context
meant `Journalism and I'.
Though I wrote quite a bit, it was not enough. We released first draft of the
"History of UNI" in Chandigarh in January 2002 and again in Mumbai on
June 4, 2006, the opening day of the 9th All India Conference of the UNI
Employees Federation that elected me the General Secretary with a mandate to lock
horns with the management on the problems of the employees and the company
itself. So much was happening along side. And I was unable to keep pace with
developments relating to UNI. By being in UNI employees' union in
various states and in the UNI Employees Federation since my joining the company
in 1986 never meant that I worked only for the welfare of the employees.
My concern has always been for the UNI as an organization that has taken care
of me , my colleagues and the society.
If the book became my passion to
bring facts of the historic movement of about one thousand employees of the UNI
along with wider issues of media in Indian society and the need to evolve a
holistic perspective of Peoples Media to the fore, it is because of the
troubled times that UNI is undergoing and our 'dream' to takeover its
management in our own hands so as to enable us to prepare a viable business model for such a
company which is all set to be born again, second time after the emergency era
of Indira Gandhi, like a proverbial phoenix from the ashes to address the need of its
employees and democratic urge on the part of the civil society as well to
ensure free flow of information's to one and all. You will agree, it is history
of UNI written in hurry by a journalist.
