Illustration: Outlook

On 13 December 2001, the Indian Parliament was attacked by five—some say six—heavily armed men. Why have 13 Indian intellectuals now written about the attack? Naresh Fernandes explains in Time Out Mumbai:

In their landmark book Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in 1988 described a “propaganda model” of the US media in which “the powerful are able to fix the premises of discourse, to decide what the general populace is allowed to see, hear and think about, and to ‘manage’ public opinion by regular propaganda campaigns”. It all sounded alarmingly Orwellian, but 400 pages of material – and recent evidence of how easily the US media swallowed official rationalisations for invading Iraq – make it impossible to disregard the book’s central premise.

The shallow standards set by the US media in the matter of upholding the perceived national interest have been adopted by its Indian counterparts with increasing eagerness since the dawn of so-called liberalisation in the early 1990s. That’s terrifying apparent in 13 Dec, a collection of 15 pieces by academics, activists, lawyers and journalists that examines the attack on parliament on that date in 2001. Five years later, the facts of the incident are still confusing (at its most basic, the authorities aren’t sure whether the assault was mounted by five men or six), as is the logic of the case presented by the prosecutors.

But you wouldn’t know very much about this from your daily newspapers or from the television newscasts. The Indian media fervently reported every confession made by the alleged conspirators and vociferously echoed the government’s claim that Pakistan had hatched the conspiracy to destroy the symbol of Indian democracy. All of this resulted in a little embarrassment when one of the accused men, a soft-spoken Delhi lecturer named SAR Geelani, was eventually acquitted. But another alleged participant in the plot, Mohammed Afzal, is still on death row.

Arundhati Roy sets the tone for the collection in her searing opening essay, posing 13 questions about the investigation into the attack and its implications for our democracy. She’s ably supported by powerful arguments by Praful Bidwai, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Nandita Haksar and Sonia Jabbar, among others. This is essential reading for anyone who believes that our nation consists of more than just an overheated economy.