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Farmers raise slogans during a Punjab-wide “rail roko” protest at a village near Amritsar on December 18, 2024. | Photo Credit: Raminder Pal Singh/ANI
I had the opportunity to be with Frontline for 33 continuous years in its 40-year journey, joining the desk as a sub-editor in 1989 and retiring as Editor in 2022. The magazine’s success as an alternative voice has a lot to do with the fact that it was launched at a time when India and the world at large were in the throes of epochal, earth-shaking changes—politically, economically, and socioculturally. At the international level, the crash of the grand socialist experiment in the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, the rise of the US and its consequences, the growing economic inequality, the deepening of the West Asian crisis, the tightening of the hold of the Bretton Woods institutions, the emergence of China as a formidable competitor to the capitalist world, the socialist surprise in Latin America, and so on, forced the world to have a relook at the way it was interpreted until then.
India’s immediate neighbourhood was the stage on which the South Asian drama was played, with many twists and turns and huge implications for India: Sri Lanka was imploding with its ethnic war, Nepal shook off its monarchy and started its experiments with democracy, Pakistan and Bangladesh were hurtling from crisis to crisis, and Afghanistan was in endless turmoil. In India, as the Congress system went into free fall, not before steering the country from the path of a mixed economy to the highway of liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation, an array of regional parties became Prime Minister-makers and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-backed BJP moved up the political ladder after a few coalition experiments.
In this content-rich environment, Frontline did not just stop with recording these momentous changes. It explained, analysed, and interpreted them and presented alternative ways of looking at the world politically, economically, socially, and culturally. It was the combination of empirical evidence and theoretical framework that drew students, researchers, academics, sociopolitical activists, policymakers, and diplomats to Frontline in large numbers. While the thematic cover stories were enriched by the objective reports of a hand-picked team of correspondents, social scientists, and writers offered interpretations that challenged conventional wisdom in the domains of politics and economics. A team of copy editors and designers put in long working hours and extraordinary efforts to meet the rigorous editorial standards set by former Editor-in-Chief N. Ram and veteran news editor K. Narayanan. “Don’t tamper with the writers’ style while editing”, “Rewrite copy only if it is absolutely necessary”, “No jazzing up”, “In headlines, accuracy is more important than alliteration”, “While editing letters to the editor, keep the criticism and cut out the abuse”—such instructions kept ringing in the ears of the copy editors.
World affairs, photo features, and book reviews were constants in the magazine. Long-form journalism, another practice consciously promoted by Ram, was Frontline’s forte. The task of bringing out 500-odd issues, about 18 of them special issues, in my long stint was highly challenging. But what made it enjoyable was Ram’s policy of zero interference in editorial freedom!