The Billionaire Raj

by James Crabtree

  Goswami’s power was all too readily acknowledged by those he targeted. “It was basically Arnab who started it, everybody else jumped to the bandwagon,” I was told in London by Vijay Mallya, who blamed the anchor for portraying his sudden departure to the UK as a flight from justice. Even the publicity-wary Mukesh Ambani, speaking in a rare interview of his own in 2016, confessed to being a regular Newshour viewer.5 Through all this, Goswami became India’s most feared watchdog, a one-man judge, jury, and national moral arbiter. His favored catchphrase—“The nation wants to know!” often yelled at guests midway through interviews—became a byword for India’s newly assertive fourth estate.

  As foreign money poured into media ventures, new channels like Times Now reflected the churn of the post-liberalization years. But they helped to create it too, taking their place alongside the other independent democratic institutions that began to investigate corruption and challenge old hierarchies, from activist judges and government auditors to anti-corruption charities using freedom-of-information laws to ferret out wrongdoing. To his admirers, Goswami was a muckraker in the noble tradition of the campaigning magazines of late nineteenth-century America, which picked fights with corporate monopolies and corrupt politicians. Yet his influence was just as often lamented by those who saw in him echoes of the fearmongering “yellow journalism” of US publisher William Randolph Hearst. In 2012, liberal academic Madhu Kishwar laid out this broader critique in an open letter, comparing Goswami’s show to a kangaroo court in which its host ignored “the necessary dividing line between journalist and crusader.”6 In Goswami’s style, critics saw an Indian variant of what became known later as “post-truth” politics, in which the nightly clash of guests deepened social divisions but added little to public understanding.

  I arranged a meeting with Goswami over lunch in late 2014, settling down the night before to watch a full edition of The Newshour in preparation. The topic was a court case in the ongoing IPL cricket scandal, a story that Goswami had pursued doggedly over the preceding two years. The show began in bravura style: “Will he be sacked?” he thundered in his opening section, attacking Narayanaswami Srinivasan, who at the time still hoped to return as the head of Indian cricket. Wearing a dark suit and looking grimly serious, Goswami accused “shameless” administrators of “cheating the people, cheating you and me.” Pausing, he addressed the audience directly, his voice rising sharply: “Will you watch a tournament which has fallen so low?”

  From there, events descended rapidly into a familiar form of bedlam, as the host called out “Let’s debate!” and introduced eight guests in turn. None were in a studio: for all its relentless pace and seizure-inducing graphics, The Newshour was a low-budget affair, and many of his interviewees joined from their workplaces or shambolic offices at home, with bookshelves and plant pots as backdrops. That night’s star turn was Vindu Dara Singh, a small-time actor who had been arrested on suspicion of illegal betting during the cricket scandal back in 2013, before being released on bail. (His trial remained pending at the time of writing.) He was interviewed in front of an anonymous brown curtain, making it look as if he had agreed to appear from inside a photo booth.

  Amid the chaos, Goswami played ringmaster and orchestrator, barracking his invitees and setting one against the other. Sometimes all eight appeared at once: a row of four boxes along the top of the screen, and four more along the bottom, with a special double-height box for Goswami on the left. When he interrogated a guest head-to-head, there would be just three boxes: the host on the left, the interviewee on the right, and a middle box showing dramatic stock footage of players being arrested or IPL executives fleeing from cameramen. Red and blue graphics whizzed around, enveloping whoever was speaking in a barrage of flashing words and colors.

  Although no actual news was being broken, the word “BREAKING” was almost never absent from the screen. The disorder was interrupted only for commercial breaks and periodic Goswami mini-monologues: “What is at stake tonight is our love of cricket,” he said at one point, as the hashtag #SackIPLChief whooshed across below. Towards the end he peppered Dara Singh with questions, shouting down the actor’s attempts to answer and jabbing his finger in the air. Eventually, Dara Singh ripped off his microphone and walked out, leaving only the brown curtain in shot, and providing a moment of satisfying catharsis for host and viewer alike. The spectacle was exhilarating but exhausting, and by the end I felt in need of a lie-down. More alarmingly, after watching for an hour, I was little the wiser as to the basic facts of that day’s developments.

  When we met the next day, the difference in his appearance was jarring. Then just in his early forties, Goswami in person looked far younger and softer than he did on screen. The sharp suit was replaced by a casual black shirt and dark blue jeans. The hair gel he wore on screen was absent too, leaving a thick black fringe to flop forward over hipsterish square black glasses. Also gone was the overbearing voice, as he told me quietly about a recent trip to Oxford, where he had given a speech about the state of Indian media, and where he had once studied for a master’s in social anthropology. At once charming and thoughtful, and scrupulously polite throughout, his was a mild-mannered alter ego fit for a superhero comic, as if I’d planned to meet Superman and Clark Kent showed up instead.

  We met in a fancy hotel not far from the Times Now studio in midtown Mumbai, surrounded by half-finished glass towers and the hubbub of traffic. Goswami lived down the road with his wife and young son, preferring life in the financial capital to New Delhi, whose culture of intrigues he claimed to despise. Living in Mumbai was mostly a personal and family decision, he told me, but also a political one. More than anything, he styled himself as an outsider to the capital’s journalistic establishment, whom he referred to witheringly as the “Lutyens crowd,” a reference to the incestuous geographical heart of Delhi, where many of the country’s most powerful politicians, business leaders and senior media figures tended to live.

  As if to confirm his iconoclast image, Goswami walked out of Times Now in late 2016, a few months after his broadcast on the attacks at Uri, and announced plans to set up a channel of his own. He called it Republic TV and launched it about six months later. The move was partly about control: Times Now was owned by Bennett, Coleman & Co., a powerful media conglomerate, which also ran the Times of India. Goswami was by now an industry giant, but he was also merely an employee, and one who had to defer to the company’s powerful owners. There were broader ambitions too, one of which he hinted that day in Mumbai. India’s media now acted as a watchdog against domestic corruption, he told me, but it would soon go on to take a much larger global role, by creating international broadcasters that would rival the likes of Al Jazeera or CNN. “So many Indians speak English that we will be the media capital of the world,” he told me, giving just the briefest flash of the kind of hopelessly grandiloquent statements he trotted out each evening on air. “India, with its competence and technology, with English, with the fact that we are a very vibrant democracy, we are going to be the global media powerhouse.”

  Super Prime Time

  India’s TV news boom began on February 5, 1995, as Prannoy Roy, a sober-sounding presenter in a cream-colored suit, first introduced The News Tonight—and ran instantly into trouble. “On the very first night of our news broadcast I was anchoring and decided to show off a little,” Roy recounted of his debut bulletin, the first in India to be produced by a private company. “As we went on air, I looked at my watch and said: ‘It’s eight o’clock and this news comes to you live.’ Someone in the PM’s office heard the word ‘live’ and threw a fit.”7

  After years of pressure, India had finally allowed a private sector production house to make a news program for the state-owned Doordarshan. But cautious politicians thought an actual “live” broadcast a step too far, forcing Roy to record the evening’s show ten minutes before it went on air. But by then the principle had been established: tha
t night, New Delhi Television, or just NDTV, opened a crack in the government’s long-running broadcasting monopoly, which others would soon begin to force wider. Another private operator ran a live nighttime news bulletin on its own channels for the first time later that year. In under a decade, dozens of rolling-news operators had launched, operating in English and other major languages, including NDTV’s own rolling-news channel, NDTV 24x7, in 2003.

  India’s news pioneers were scrappy affairs, broadcasting from makeshift studios and operating on tiny budgets. But founders like Roy, who set up NDTV as a production company in 1988 alongside his wife, Radhika, were ambitious, seeing in their young medium a chance to replicate the ideals of education and objectivity articulated by public service broadcasters like the BBC. They attracted eager young journalists: Arnab Goswami joined NDTV in 1995 and was promoted rapidly. A generation of news anchors grew up in the same mold: Rajdeep Sardesai, who was Goswami’s boss, and who also left in 2005 to found rival rolling-news outfit CNN-IBN; or Karan Thapar, a dapper, plummy-voiced presenter, on whose serious and thoughtful evening discussion programs I would occasionally appear as a guest commentator.

  More than anyone, though, it was the Roys who embodied the sector’s youthful hopes: grand, high-minded Delhi insiders; media radicals but also establishment stalwarts; a power couple who saw broadcasting as a progressive endeavor, an opportunity to shape the nation. Put another way, Prannoy and Radhika Roy stood for almost everything that Goswami would later react against.

  This was partly personal. Goswami moved to NDTV after his first job as a junior editor at The Telegraph, a newspaper in Kolkata. Over the next decade he became one of the channel’s more prominent faces, ending up as a senior editor and presenter of his own show, also called The Newshour. But his tenure was not always happy, especially towards the end, as he grew dissatisfied with his position as second-tier host, and chafed at Sardesai’s position as the network’s unquestioned star performer.

  The offer to establish a new channel for India’s most powerful media group, which arrived when he was only in his early thirties, would have been hard to turn down under any circumstances. But beyond his brewing resentment, Goswami’s move to launch Times Now was also born of growing disagreement over style. “The standard bulletin, with a political story in the beginning, a sports story somewhere in the middle, and an entertainment or ‘back-of-the-book’ feature at the end, was a very nineties way of doing it,” he told me when we met over lunch. “When a person turns on, he’s not going to wait for one hour for you to run the particular news package. So we focused a lot more on events as they were happening.”

  Times Now was far from an immediate hit. As editor in chief, Goswami masterminded news coverage during the day, before taking to the studio for his own show at night. Alongside the usual staples of cricket and Bollywood, the channel began as a mishmash of politics and business, mixing news with features, and drawing weak ratings. For months after its launch, rumors swirled that Goswami was struggling to retain the confidence of Bennett, Coleman & Co.’s powerful media baron proprietors, the brothers Vineet and Samir Jain. “He grew unsettled, unpredictable and deeply insecure,” according to an account by journalist Rahul Bhatia. It was a stressful period, and one that helped Goswami win a reputation for treating his subordinates harshly. “Away from the eyes of the millions who watched him, his behavior consisted of throwing things, kicking chairs and, in one instance, dislocating his own shoulder during an argument with an executive producer.”8

  The channel found its footing only gradually, first ditching the corporate coverage, then following Goswami’s instincts for more emotional stories involving human interest, or more likely human suffering, which in India remained sadly plentiful. With fewer resources than his rivals, he focused on fewer stories too, flooding in reporters and outside broadcast vans to capture gripping live footage, and reporting relentlessly in the hope of turning otherwise minor episodes into national events. Some involved social injustice: issues of caste violence or the treatment of women, for instance. But just as often it was misfortune in a simpler sense: a collapsed building in the suburbs, a hospital providing shoddy care, or Indian citizens being treated shabbily in Australia or America; ordinary situations of suffering or inconvenience, for which someone in authority needed to be held quickly and brutally accountable.

  Over lunch, Goswami told me that he took particular pride in finding “stories of individual loss, individual tragedy” that would otherwise have “been buried in the inside pages of a newspaper.” He pushed these as news during the day, then rammed them home on his discussion show later in the evening. The new style worked a treat: within a few years, he was able to say that Times Now had beaten its great rival NDTV in the ratings, a claim Goswami has never since tired of repeating.

  One Saturday in 2016, I watched Goswami deliver a barnstorming talk at a book festival in Mumbai. He recounted a story of his early days at Times Now, when a foreign journalist had lectured him on “the basic rules of reporting,” namely the need to stay impartial and avoid expressing your own opinions. “Why, for God’s sake, should we not express our opinion?” he shouted at the audience. He then went on to list the national outrages on which his channel had made its views clear—the Commonwealth Games scam, the 2G scam, the mining scam, the IPL—drawing loud, sustained applause from the crowd.

  Moments that combined the drama of breaking news with this brewing sense of national outrage were his particular gift, with the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks an especially formative moment. “I think we did about 100 hours of coverage, and I anchored about 75, 80 hours,” he recalled of the days when Pakistani militants killed more than 160 people in a dramatic series of assaults, culminating in a shoot-out at the city’s famous Taj Mahal Palace hotel. Dropping all commercial breaks, Goswami barely left the studio for days. His indignant coverage drew in viewers, channeling first anger at Pakistani support for the attacks, and then a rising sense of middle-class humiliation over the state’s incompetent response, in which militants armed with submachine guns had been countered by police wielding batons and old-fashioned rifles. The city’s armed response teams had been provided with AK-47s, but no bullets had been bought for three years.9

  This intuitive sense for middle-class indignation also lay behind Goswami’s singular focus on corruption. He was far from the first Indian journalist to make a name for himself on the topic: as editor of the Indian Express, Arun Shourie fought memorable battles with Dhirubhai Ambani in the mid-1980s, and, alongside The Hindu, helped to expose the Bofors arms scandal a few years later. Yet these journalists of the old school mostly did their work through gradual, painstaking reporting. Goswami broke his fair share of scoops too, but his journalistic mission strayed far beyond that narrow task. Instead, he wanted to act as a cheerleader for the nation’s new wave of anti-corruption protests, which began in 2011. For an audience born in more deferential times, there was something undeniably thrilling about watching Goswami in full spate, tearing strips off authority figures. He had a knack for articulating what viewers were already thinking. “His pronouncements are rooted in everyday frustrations,” as Rahul Bhatia put it. “Why is Pakistan dithering? Why can’t Australians admit that they’re racist? Why is the government indifferent to the middle class? Who is responsible for all this?”10

  Goswami’s populist instincts came partly from his own background, growing up first in the rural state of Assam in India’s isolated northeastern region. His family moved often when he was young, following his father’s army postings. He studied later at a well-regarded college in New Delhi, although not one of the very best. Comfortable but not privileged, it was an upbringing that later fed his sense of himself as an outsider. It was at school, however, that he first discovered a passion for public speaking. “Since I was ten or eleven years old I have been debating,” he told me. “So when you debate you really debate. It’s points versus points, your point
s versus mine.” Goswami often cites these youthful parliamentary debating tournaments as his early training ground for television, a deft claim, in that it roots his belligerent style in an activity most people would instinctively admire. Yet his persona undeniably retains the imprint of those early contests, whose young participants are drilled to find extreme and eye-catching arguments, and then assert them as forcefully as possible, whether they actually happen to believe in them or not.

  In 2016, not long before he quit Times Now, I went to watch The Newshour being recorded. The studio’s entrance was partially hidden along a narrow side street in Lower Parel, a disorderly neighborhood in midtown Mumbai that had once been filled with textile mills, but was now equal parts commercial hub and chaotic permanent building site. Goswami looked relaxed when I arrived at around 7 p.m., dressed in a knee-length orange kurta over black jeans and sneakers, with his dark hair flopping loosely over his forehead.