The Caravan Magazine

21/12/2024

❄️ Winter vibes, warm deals! ❄️

Sound journalism at an additional 20% off. Start the new year informed and inspired!

Subscribe now: https://caravanmagazine.in/subscribe

19/12/2024

From wealth to influence, the Ambanis' reach spans industries, media, and narratives in India. How does this shape our democracy and public discourse?

Join Sagar & Amrita Singh from The Caravan for a freewheeling conversation.
📅 6 PM, Fri, 20 Dec
👉 https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1dRKZdZjQAmJB

19/12/2024

Abhay Regi: Why is the dominant narrative failing in the West?

Joe Sacco: Well, let’s take Gaza, for example. People can see for themselves what’s going on in Gaza. That’s the power of social media. For all its many faults—and I would be the first to say there are many grave faults—what it’s doing is basically cutting out the middleman. It’s straight from someone’s camera to your news feed. Now, that has problems, because I think you need journalists to talk about the context, to frame these things in a way that isn’t just “Oh I’m just looking at some sort of s***f footage.” You need to understand what’s going on, and that’s what journalists help contextualise.

Read the full interview: https://caravanmagazine.in/media/joe-sacco-journalism-declining-press-freedom

19/12/2024

A former employee who was involved in Reliance’s sports ventures thought that Nita Ambani’s prominent role was the result of her being able to communicate the emotion around sport better than her husband. “Getting a lady, who helms the family, to be a part of it made more sense overall,” they said, “because of the fact that, if Mr Ambani would have done it, it would have been positioned as a business.” Reliance also wanted to promote women in sports, they added, recalling a business head saying at one meeting, “If a man sits and watches a sport, he just sits and watches, but if a woman sits and watches a sport, the entire family watches.”

Nita was not present at that year’s IPL auction and attended about a third of the matches in the first season. The following year, however, the tournafment was moved to South Africa because it clashed with the Indian general election. The former rival IPL executive said that Nita travelled to South Africa with around thirty friends. “Fifteen women used to come, and they used to recite bhajans in the stands.” After Mumbai Indians won their fourth title, a decade later, an Ambani family priest told the media that they performed the Chandi Paath, a collection of seven hundred verses dedicated to the goddess Durga, before every match.

Read the full report on Nita Ambani's campaign to conquer the public eye:
https://caravanmagazine.in/media/nita-ambani-campaign-public-eye

19/12/2024

Many editors said the editorial culture Rahul Joshi, the managing director of Network18, brought to the network had been shaped during his time at the Economic Times. Within two years of his 2004 shift to Delhi, from editing a weekly supplement in Mumbai, he would become the executive editor—and, soon after, the editorial director—of the world’s second-most widely read English-language business newspaper. “It was a meteoric rise,” a former colleague of Joshi said. “He had superseded many people in the hierarchy and was picked up by Samir Jain himself.”

Jain was the vice-chairperson of Bennett, Coleman and Company Limited, the only media conglomerate that mirrors Network18 in reach and influence. Jain was never shy about treating journalism as a means to advertising revenue. Joshi proved vital to him in executing BCCL’s system of private treaties—agreements by which the conglomerate swapped advertising space for buying stakes in companies. A leaked email from November 2007 shows Joshi asking his staff to give favourable coverage to private-treaty clients without making it look like advertisements. A former ET journalist said that Joshi was only implementing Jain’s mandate, but that he “was on top of the game.” In three years, the company had five hundred private-treaty clients, before the Securities and Exchange Board of India issued guidelines mandating media companies declare such affiliations if they wrote a story about them.

Read Sagar's report on how Reliance hollowed out Asia’s largest media conglomerate:
https://caravanmagazine.in/media/network-18-ambani-reliance-hollowed-out-barter-modi

18/12/2024

Besides the few props that Khursheed Ali and Nasir Hassan bring with them, such as chains and pherans, the artists utilise objects and elements—whether barbed wire or wildflowers—in the surroundings. The question of how people are connected to these objects and the histories of these landscapes is at the crux of their work. By exploring this, they wrote in their note, they deliberately subvert the widespread representation of Kashmir as a “Paradise Landscape,” and focus instead on the histories and harsh realities of rootedness, habitation, conflict and violence, by, for instance, performing at unremarkable locations they call “otherscapes,” such as sites of massive construction projects that displace local populations.

Read the entire photo essay, by Shahid Tantray, on performance art as resistance in Kashmir

https://caravanmagazine.in/arts/kashmir-resistance-art

Watch the video report: https://youtu.be/BypvlL02Qk4

18/12/2024

“Lack of transparency on the part of legacy media—newspapers, magazines, even TV—has contributed a lot to the rise of influencers,” Ankit Lal, a political campaign strategist formerly in charge of social media for the Aam Aadmi Party, told Aathira Konikkara. “Because of that, social media became the primary source of information for a huge set of youngsters and, post-COVID, even for elderly people.” He opined that “attention is real estate” in the influencer economy. Young voters have greater access to the internet and increasingly rely on it to learn more about everything. The availability of such content in multiple languages has meant the currency of influencers is not just an urban phenomenon. “Anyone who wants to market themselves—be it a product, an individual, or a politician—are constantly in search of places where there is an audience that they can communicate their message to,” Lal explained. These factors make social media a sphere of influence that political parties try to harness, especially when competing in elections.

Read the full report on how politicians use influencers to escape accountability:

The rise of influencers in India has taken place in tandem with the growing strength of a regime that has prioritised image-making over governance. Many of them were not known for their political opinions before the Modi years, which are marked by a clampdown on free speech and press freedoms.

18/12/2024

Nita Ambani’s omnipresence resonates with Mukesh’s philosophy of seeing Reliance everywhere. His ideology, according to several former employees, has been to dominate, if not monopolise, any new field he enters, by capitalising on existing weaknesses. Each of the commercial sectors where Nita has played a major role—sports, fashion and art—expanded greatly in the aftermath of liberalisation, with rising disposable incomes among a section of Indian society holding the promise of creating new audiences. Reliance expanded into these industries just as they were getting professionalised and vastly outspent its competitors to corner the market.

These monopolistic tendencies have often been to the detriment of the industries, which have seen a drastic reduction in competition and increase in the Ambanis’ bargaining power. With the COVID-19 pandemic hitting each of them hard, most of Reliance’s businesses in these sectors are not profitable. However, their losses represent a rounding error when compared to the scale of the entire conglomerate. Irrespective of the companies’ success, these fields, and Nita’s rising profile in them, contribute to the Ambanis’ soft power, something that Mukesh’s primary rival, Gautam Adani, cannot yet come close to matching. One filmmaker who has observed the Ambanis’ growing hold over Bollywood said that they have a “need to establish [themselves] as the first family of India.” It is not a new sentiment—oligarchs have often used their fortunes to such ends, in the interest of perpetuating their influence over generations. “The Rothschilds, the Guggenheims, everyone has done it,” they said.

Read the full report on Nita Ambani's campaign to conquer the public eye:
https://caravanmagazine.in/media/nita-ambani-campaign-public-eye

18/12/2024

In March 2020, The Caravan reported on a virtual meeting Modi had held with many media owners and editors asking them to not report “negative” news on the COVID-19 outbreak, mere hours before he imposed a harsh lockdown. As with much of the coverage we analysed following the meeting, Network18 dutifully fell in line with his request.

The team member did not enjoy their job. “You know, ethically, we didn’t feel it was the right way to kind of spy on our anchors,” they told me. “But that was the demand of our job. We had to do it.” They worried that if they were found to have missed informing the management about a remark offensive to Reliance’s sensibilities, they would be out of a job. When I asked if the buck stopped with Amitava Sinha Roy, the team member said, “If the message was strong enough, he would send it to Rahul Joshi,” the managing director of the parent company, Network18 Media and Investment Limited.

Read Sagar's report on how Reliance hollowed out Asia’s largest media conglomerate:
https://caravanmagazine.in/media/network-18-ambani-reliance-hollowed-out-barter-modi

17/12/2024

Stories beyond the headlines. Commentary that challenges conventional wisdom.

The December media issue of The Caravan is out now: https://caravanmagazine.in/magazine

Subscribe now to read and support journalism that stands the test of time.
https://caravanmagazine.in/subscribe

17/12/2024

Over the course of Aathira's reporting, most influencers were very hard to get in touch with. For instance, when she contacted Kamiya Jani, a popular YouTuber and former journalist, for an interview, she referred Aathira to the event manager at Curly Tales. The manager approached the request like a publicist, inquiring about The Caravan’s reach on social media and outlining their expectations for collaborative content creation, including pre-approved drafts and promotional plans. It became evident that she needed assurance that Aathira's story would present Jani favourably. When Aathira clarified that her focus was strictly on reporting, the discussion did not move forward.

In the literal sense, according to the satirist and podcaster Anurag Minus Verma, anyone is capable of influencing opinions. “But in the mainstream sense [in which] the word is used, there has to be some brand, some mechanical reproduction of content,” Anurag explained, to draw in online traffic. On social media and video-hosting apps such as YouTube, influencers have built their identities out of dispensing views on what to buy, what to wear, where to travel, what to eat and what to think—all of which makes for enticing content for Internet users who are seeking out new choices, habits and sources of entertainment.

Read the full report on how politicians use influencers to escape accountability:
https://caravanmagazine.in/media/sponsored-content-influencers-bjp-aap-congress-mygov-beerbiceps

17/12/2024

Besides her work on the Jamnagar township, Nita Ambani had already helped run the Dhirubhai Ambani International School and the HN Reliance Hospital in Mumbai. By the end of the 2000s, she had lost weight and often ditched her salwar kameez for corporate wear. Like most other wives of billionaires, she headed the family’s philanthropic efforts, through the Reliance Foundation. But she was also present at the Indian Premier League auctions and games involving the family’s Mumbai Indians franchise, and was front and centre in promoting a new football league that came to take over the domestic game. In 2016, she became the first Indian woman to become an IOC member. Three years later, she was elected to the board of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. On 14 November 2024, she was named chairperson of JioStar, the company’s joint venture with Walt Disney.

The author Shobhaa Dé refused to talk about the Ambanis, saying that they had been friends for four decades, but said, “It’s phenomenal what she has achieved in terms of branding for the company—I am happy to be quoted on that, it’s fab. She has put them on the global map.” A former Reliance Retail executive said that Nita “represents a softer, a more empathetic side” to the business. “Everything was hard about the Reliance brand till then.”

As her portfolio has grown, Nita has actively sought out the spotlight. The former RIL employee recalled her once saying, “We do so much, we do more than the Tatas, but only Mr Tata is talked about in the press.” (Several employees mentioned a “complex” when it came to the Tatas’ public perception.) Sports journalists told me that, whenever someone wins a medal at the Olympics, Reliance publicists harangue them to publish Nita’s photograph and congratulatory quote. Other industrialists are not “so in your face,” one journalist said. “They’ll try to be subtle.” A Mumbai-based fashion journalist likened Nita to the Modi government when it comes to an obsession with controlling the public narrative.

Read the full report on Nita Ambani's campaign to conquer the public eye:
https://caravanmagazine.in/media/nita-ambani-campaign-public-eye

17/12/2024

This kind of monitoring was not unknown to other newsrooms. Before 2019, the team members’ primary job was to compare Network18 news channels with competitors who had a better rating that month. Comparing, for instance, the bulletins on CNBC TV18 to those of ET Now, or a news bulletin on CNN News18 with a coterminous rant at Republic, could help give ideas about how to improve content. But never before was the analysis carried out to censor the reports of their own editors and anchors, or to scrutinise coverage on Reliance businesses and its rivals. As is evident from emails The Caravan has access to, they were expected to highlight things such as the light in which the anchors of CNBC TV18 covered quarterly results of the telecom provider Vodafone Idea—specified as a competitor of Reliance Jio. It was a specialised job. Someone with “political acumen” would watch CNN News18, and those with a business background CNBC TV18, before being rotated to other time slots or channels.

On occasion, they would have to dust down that business background. Just ahead of the 2020 budget, official data was showing a fall in India’s GDP: 7.5 percent down from the second quarter a year before. “The first thing was, the editorial was directly told not to highlight that India isn’t doing well,” the team member said. “CNBC was told not to focus on the news in a negative sense.” Conveniently for those managing the channel, reports had just emerged of a virus spreading through China. The team member said that the anchors focussed on the COVID-19 pandemic and its repercussions on the Indian market. “That became part of our budget analysis rather than understanding why the Indian economy was in a slump for the government failure.”

Read Sagar's report on how Reliance hollowed out Asia’s largest media conglomerate:
https://caravanmagazine.in/media/network-18-ambani-reliance-hollowed-out-barter-modi

14/12/2024

Former employees and associates of the Ambanis told Amrita Singh that Nita Ambani has always been involved in just the branding and design sides of the business, but never in its operations. When Reliance Retail was being set up in the mid 2000s, one of them said, she would often attend meetings with top RIL executives. “Nita bhabhi here was on the design of the floor, what would the front look like, what would the floor look like,” they said. “There was not a war, but there was some ‘Hum yehi discuss karenge toh business kab karenge?’”—If we keep discussing this, when will we discuss the actual business? The former employee added that Mukesh and others nudged Nita away from Reliance Retail to the fields of sports and culture, where she had shown interest. By all accounts, Mukesh and his “hatchet man,” as a former employee described the Reliance director Manoj Modi, have called all the shots over the past two decades.

Read the full report on Nita Ambani's campaign to conquer the public eye:
https://caravanmagazine.in/media/nita-ambani-campaign-public-eye

14/12/2024

The body of a person who died from COVID-19 rests on a funeral pyre in Delhi, in May 2021. A Firstpost staffer was shifted to a non-journalism department after she had written that a statement by Modi about the COVID crisis, “after a prolonged silence … did not go down well with people on social media.”

Network18's staffers described an organisation whose editorial will had been systematically centralised and set to serve two agendas. Those of Reliance’s other businesses and those of Modi, his government and ideology. Read Sagar's report on how Reliance hollowed out Asia’s largest media conglomerate:
https://caravanmagazine.in/media/network-18-ambani-reliance-hollowed-out-barter-modi

11/12/2024

The Caravan: The truth, in all its complexity.

Become a subscriber today!
https://caravanmagazine.in/subscribe

Read the latest issue:
https://caravanmagazine.in/

10/12/2024

The National Creator Awards was organised under MyGov, a “citizen engagement platform” instituted under the ministry of electronics and information technology in 2014. “[MyGov] had asked us to provide some influencers,” Saurav Chaudhary, the CEO of Savin Communication, a PR agency engaged in marketing via influencers, told me. “We did it. Our influencers got an opportunity to attend that event. That was a big thing for our influencers.” Seventy thousand influencers are registered with his company, which arranges for them to work with various clients ranging from private entities to political parties. In a nutshell, an influencer working for such an agency serves as an advertiser for the agency’s client. Savin Communications is also one of the eight influencer marketing agencies empanelled by MyGov following a March 2023 tender inviting bids from them to work with the government to “reach out to a wider targeted population and enhance citizen engagement to a higher level.” Chaudhary refused to discuss the work that his company is producing with MyGov, citing it as confidential.

Thousands of influencers registered with Savin Communications have participated in election campaigns across states. Read Aathira Konikkara's report on how politicians use influencers to escape accountability:
https://caravanmagazine.in/media/sponsored-content-influencers-bjp-aap-congress-mygov-beerbiceps

09/12/2024

It is Nita Ambani who has emerged as the face of Reliance’s new ventures.

Born to a Gujarati family in Mumbai, she had been a final year student of commerce at Narsee Monjee College when Dhirubhai’s wife, Kokilaben Ambani, saw her perform at a Bharatanatyam recital, in 1984, and decided to marry her to Mukesh Ambani. The courtship lasted three weeks. “I was a girl of twenty,” Nita told the talk show host Simi Garewal, years later. “I had not even thought of marriage at the time, and I wanted to make my mark in dancing.” The family friend, who frequented the Ambani household during the 1980s and 1990s, described Nita during this period as “fully bahu-ed out”—a model daughter-in-law. However, as Mukesh took over the business in the early 2000s, the former Reliance Infocomm employee said, “MDA would not take a single call on design without NMA being involved.” (People in the Ambanis’ orbit often refer to the couple by their initials.) Nita was also the intermediary with the family astrologer, and employees would often be sent to her to find out whether something was auspicious or not. She began telling the media that she acted as a sounding board for Mukesh’s ideas. “Today, I know what business is about,” she said in one interview. “Today, I understand and help Mukesh in execution.”

Those who watched Nita's rise revealed an almost megalomaniacal instinct to thrust herself into the spotlight and position herself as the jewel in the Reliance crown. Read Amrita Singh's report on Nita's campaign to conquer the public eye:
https://caravanmagazine.in/media/nita-ambani-campaign-public-eye