Goodbye, Mr Chips

The sacking of top notch editor MJ Akbar bodes ill for the fraternity. SHANTANU GUHA RAY reports

ON THE morning of March 1, MJ Akbar — founder editor of The Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle and a legend in his time — was driving to work when he was overtaken by a flurry of messages on his Blackberry asking him to check his paper’s masthead: his name had gone missing overnight, replaced with that of T. Venkatt Ram Reddy, the publisher.

57-year-old Akbar was not surprised, simply distraught. The dignity and grace with which he had wanted to exit had died its chance. But, in a sense, 30 years in the business should’ve been subconscious preparation. In standoffs between management and editors, the latter have always taken the ignominous cuts. Arun Shourie. BG Verghese. Dileep Padgaonkar. VK Narasimhan. The list of illustrious scalps before Akbar is long, yet the complete absence of ceremony with which he has been ousted is one more body blow to the waning institution of the editor. Unfortunately publications, too often now, are known more for their numbers than their personalities and Akbar is one of the last of a breed who valued voice and teeth and bite and other such fading journalistic grails.

The rift itself though had been brewing for more than a year. The grapevine is rife with unsubstantiated insight. Reddy’s business interests, it appears, now range beyond newspapers and people will tell you he has been going through a major image makeover. He sports longer hair, has acqui - red a private jet for nearly Rs 40 crores, owns the Hyderabad cric - ket team in the Indian Premier League (IPL) and wants to launch an air cargo business. It is against this backdrop that his friction with Akbar took seed. Reddy’s confidants claim he was under intense political pressure because of Akbar’s anti-Congress stand and his attacks on 10, Janpath in particular. Eager for a third time Rajya Sabha nomination as a Congress candidate, he had several meetings with party powerbrokers and was told categorically that he could have one of the five Rajya Sabha seats from Andhra Pradesh only if he sacrificed Akbar. For Reddy and his expanding businesses, the choice was very clear. Akbar had to lower the pitch of his anti-Congress bugle or prepare for the midnight evacuation. Akbar’s choice is manifestly evident now.

Typically though, the grapevine is heavy with counter-rumours. People will tell you Akbar himself was in the race for a Rajya Sabha nomination from Bihar for a seat that fell vacant after the death of Rashtriya Janata Dal member, Moti-Ur Rehman. And that he was also in touch with BJP leader LK Advani for a similar favour. He’s been in such a place before, when his political engagement cast shadows on the journalism.

In 1989, Akbar had already established a formidable reputation as editor of Sunday and The Telegraph, when he moved away from journalism and levied his proximity to the former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to get a Congress ticket from Bihar’s Kishanganj constituency, from where he won himself a Lok Sabha seat. He was never a part of Sonia Gandhi’s charmed circle, however, and after the sudden death of her husband he drifted apart from the family and party and grew increasingly critical of both. In 1993, he made a flamboyant comeback to journalism by founding The Asian Age. Curiously though, his second innings never had the trailblazing quality of his earlier career. In between, Akbar also earned a reputation as a non-fiction writer with books like India: The Siege Within and The Shade of Swords.

But now, on March 1, all of that was precipitately at an end. Realising that a newspaper he had built and shaped for nearly 17 years had been wrested totally out of his grasp, Akbar sat down to write a note to his colleagues at precisely quarter to one in the afternoon: “For reasons that need not detain us, I must say farewell. I was under the impression that I might have been able to do so with more grace. But judging from this morning edition of our paper, it seems I might have overstayed my welcome… We may not have been the biggest, but we held our head high because there was one nonnegotiable asset in our family: we could not be bought. We were independent. We were free. We held our head high. Never let your head stoop, not as long as you are a journalist,” wrote Akbar. Interestingly, he remains the editor of the Indian version of The International Herald Tribune and retains the designation because of an equal partnership with Reddy.

Once he had mailed the note to his former colleagues, Akbar stayed put at home. He had no comments to offer, except to say cryptically, “India’s democracy is a little more powerful than its temporary rulers.”

The whys and wherefores and the inevitable shrapnel — what lies in store for those he hired, what lies in store for him — is not uppermost on Akbar’s mind. He only remembers a word he coined when Telegraph was launched: Unputdownable. He sees his refl e - ction in it. It’s also an acronym for independent editors, the fastest vanishing tribe in Indian media.