The trials and tribulations of Urdu dailies - The Morning Context

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• The walls of the room are adorned with photos of Mohammed Afzal, better known as Meem Afzal, a journalist—Afzal is the managing editor of Urdu weekly Akhbar E Nau—politician and former diplomat.

• Siddiqui is alert and active for his age. He doesn’t hold a position in any newspaper, but all my searches lead to a man who packs 86 summers and a world of knowledge in a four-feet-something frame. He knows everyone in Urdu journalism and everyone knows him.

• At the last RNI count, there were over 1,700 Urdu publications with a circulation of over 26 million. RNI, or the Office of Registrar of Newspapers for India, is a statutory body under the ministry of information and broadcasting to register publications like newspapers and periodicals.

• He has seen the good days and the bad days and survived through its rise and fall to tell the story of Urdu journalism which, he says, is dying.

• “The less I say, the better. RNI numbers don’t present the complete picture,” Siddiqui says.

• “If you go to a professor of Urdu, he will say the future is bright. That is because they see interest in Urdu poetry and get paid government salaries. But if you go to the ground and take stock of Urdu journalism, there is nothing left,” Siddiqui says.

• According to the Press in India, RNI’s annual report on print media, 1,727 Urdu publications in India, including 1,132 dailies, filed their annual reports for 2019-20, the latest year for which data is available. The total circulation of Urdu publications dropped 14% year-on-year, but they were still printing 26.24 million copies per publishing day.

• One large distributor in south Delhi said he gets three titles. Fifteen copies each of Roznama Sahara, Jadeed Indinon and Inquilab. None of them sells more than 10 copies. To put things in context, he sells 6,000 copies of The Times of India every day.

• RNI data shows Delhi had 193 Urdu publications in 2019-20. But if they are neither with vendors nor at libraries, where are these newspapers?

• “We can’t trust RNI numbers. The number was around 4,000 before 2016. But barring 8-10 genuine papers, others used to run as file copies. They would publish only on days when they got DAVP ads.”

• DAVP, or the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity, is the nodal agency of the Indian government for advertising by its various ministries and organizations and public sector undertakings.

• There was a time when the DAVP was brimming with ads. There were enough ads per month to sustain a small- to mid-size daily. So publications would register with the DAVP, claim outlandish circulation numbers—because there was no way to verify those numbers—and seek advertisements. Then, before booking an ad worth, say, Rs 4 lakh, owners of publications would dispatch Rs 2 lakh to the concerned official. And everyone would live happily ever after.

• But then, in 2016, the Narendra Modi government started tightening the screws on the media and came up with new guidelines for print. It started asking publications to share purchase details: like the cost and amount of newsprint and the GST paid on it.

• Newspaper owners who printed 500 copies and showed a circulation of 50,000 couldn’t do this anymore. Many had to shut shop.

• “There are 6-7 important centres for Urdu newspapers in India: Mumbai, Bengaluru, Srinagar, Delhi, Lucknow, Patna and Kolkata,”

• “If you count all the major publications across the country, you’d find about 40 papers that are of any worth,” says Khan. “But beyond that, there is just hype.”

• “It is all a bunch of lies,” says ZA. “People work multiple jobs just to make ends meet. The real reason why the paper runs is political.”

• Still, there are bigger, more fundamental and structural problems specific to Urdu journalism. For starters, there is no interest among younger people in reading Urdu newspapers.

• Consequently, there is no capital. And without capital, there are no investments in technology, people or innovation.

• Barring Roznama Sahara and Inquilab, all other newspapers are run by individuals or trusts. Most are struggling to survive.

• “Till last year, the advertising budget for DAVP was about Rs 800 crore. But last year, it fell to Rs 160 crore,” says Sarfaraz Arzu, editor of The Hindustan Daily, one of the oldest Urdu newspapers from Mumbai. “So if you are completely dependent on that, there is no way out for you. Private companies too have reduced their marketing budget for print significantly over the years.”

• “We used to get a lot of state government ads, but they have mostly died because KCR (Telangana chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao) ploughs those ads into his own newspapers,” says Khan from Hyderabad.

• There is a newspaper whose office is not far from where we are sitting, which hasn’t paid employees for 22 months. Then there are those that pay Rs 5,000 to journalists and Rs 3,000 to data operators. Still, they are working in the hope that things will change.

• Even the backing of corporate houses can’t guarantee success. Roznama Sahara is a good example. The first Urdu newspaper backed by a corporate house, which changed the landscape of for-profit Urdu journalism, is now struggling to keep its head above water.

• Only the Inquilab seems to be doing better in terms of finances. But it is also an outlier. Founded in 1937 by Abdul Hamid Ansari, the paper became part of the Mid-Day group launched by Abdul’s son Khaled in the late 1970s. In 2010, the print business of the group was acquired by Jagran Prakashan, which has subsequently launched multiple editions of the Inquilab.

• Why the Jagran group acquired the Urdu daily is well-documented in this Caravan story. Due to the Jagran group’s proximity to power, it still gets a lot of ads, which trickle down to all the group publications across editions. And that confidence has helped it put the paper behind a paywall.

• One only has to look at the state of Urdu education. Except for Maharashtra and Telangana, where it is still thriving, there is hardly any other state where Urdu is a medium of instruction in schools. Uttar Pradesh, where Urdu is the second language, doesn’t have Urdu-medium schools.

• “I have personally written to the management of several madrasas, asking them to participate in the newspapers: contribute articles or whatever else. But they are very reluctant,” says Khan. “Their view is that if this person gets to know what is happening in the world, he will not come back to the madrasa.”

• The same goes for most Muslim politicians who want community members to be their followers but not question them. “You have to come to Hyderabad and see the situation. Why are minor girls sold to old sheikhs in Hyderabad when there are such strong Muslim leaders in the state for decades? Go to Moradabad or Rampur, the situation is the same.”

• Baqir, a scholar and freedom activist, started a weekly called Delhi Urdu Akhbar in 1835. For two decades, he kept writing on social issues, trying to unite people against the British. In September 1857, he became the first Indian journalist to be executed by the British.

• Urdu journalism has a chequered history in India. It boasts of the third oldest language newspaper in India after English and Bengali. Hindi came much later. The first Urdu newspaper was Jam-i-Jahan-Numa, published by Harihar Dutta on 27 March 1822 in Bengal.

• There are also references to Fauji Akhbar, a weekly published around 1794 by Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore. It is said that the distribution of the weekly was limited to Tipu Sultan’s army.

• In 1857, the British government introduced the Gagging Act to regulate printing presses and restrain the tone of printed material. Newspaper offices in centres like Delhi, Meerut and Lucknow, which were important for Urdu journalism and also played a part in the mutiny, were raided and their records were destroyed.

• Still, Urdu journalism flourished. In fact, it assumed a highly nationalistic tone at the turn of the century with publications like Al Hilal (founded by Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad in 1912), Tej and Milap (1923), right till Qaumi Awaz founded by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1945.

• The first major shock to Urdu journalism was the partition of India.

• There was Jang, which was published from Daryaganj by Mir Khalil-ur-Rahman. Here, he had no political capital or support. But he moved to Karachi after partition, where the Jang reappeared and grew into what is today the Jang Media Group, also known as Geo Group.

• When I call Arzu again for some follow-up questions, he is at a protest march at Churchgate against the recent prosecution of Hindus in Bangladesh. Urdu, he says, has to stand with and for the minorities, no matter where in the world they might be.

• Because Urdu is generally associated with the Muslim community, it is more important for the language newspapers to stick to facts and not editorialize news. In times like these, when Muslims in India are at the receiving end of a lot of hate, it is easy to take a hard line. But Arzu says that Urdu papers have stayed calm, objective and upheld the Indian Constitution even in the most challenging of times.

• Arzu goes on: “With the advent of the internet and technology, you can now tap your local shops for advertisements. Their budget will be small, but it is enough to sustain a small local newspaper. The law of survival of the fittest is universal. So if you can survive, you have earned the right to live, and you’ll prosper too.”

• Arzu is the lone optimist about online Urdu journalism. People who are online are consuming news in other languages, not Urdu, because it can’t keep pace with English.

• Urdu journalism’s best hope is still print, which is dying. While the language has found a new set of enthusiasts in big cities, Urdu’s base has always been small cities in India where people are moving away from the language. And the internet is not going to bring them back.