Events have overtaken this sombre documentary, which, though interesting and relevant, doesn’t encompass important recent developments. It is about the sinister pro-Modi nationalist hysteria in India that infected the country’s quasi-Fox TV channels, and one moderate journalist who politely stood against it: NDTV’s news anchor Ravish Kumar. This was especially true in the unbearably tense period before the 2019 election in which Modi was victorious, when the Indian government launched an airstrike on Balakot in Pakistan in retaliation for a terrorist attack on an Indian police convoy in Pulwama in Kashmir.
Indian TV’s shrill pundits denounced traitors everywhere, and this documentary by Vinay Shukla details Kumar’s quiet courage in just carrying on with his reports on the widespread poverty that Modi was ignoring (preferring to stoke diversionary fascist fervour), keeping his cool amid a barrage of abuse and death threats. The pressure on NDTV and its journalists is shown getting worse, with someone having a gloomy leaving party with cake almost every week.
The film ends on a note of hope in that it dares to suggest that Kumar’s own position and values in the mainstream media will somehow survive. But after this was finished and premiered in autumn last year, Kumar quit the channel in protest at its takeover by a group led by pro-Modi billionaire Gautam Adani, and now broadcasts to the nation via his own YouTube channel, virtually in hiding. Shukla’s film shows us what led to this state of affairs but, through no fault of its own, it can’t address this complicated new situation.
We are all justifiably anxious about the conspiracy craziness propagated by YouTube truth-tellers who denounce mainstream media, so what does it mean when Kumar, a universally respected journalist whose career is regarded as a gigantic rebuke to the rotten media establishment, has to operate on YouTube? Does this mean that our attitudes to real news and fake news will have to be rewritten? Maybe. At all events, it’s a valuable view on how easy it is for the news media to become sycophantic mouthpieces for the right.
• While We Watched is released on 14 July in UK and Irish cinemas, with an Australia release date to be confirmed.
