The “Business Standard Seema Nazareth Award Award for Excellence in Journalism” for 2025 was given out on Monday at a ceremony held in New Delhi. The chief guest at the event, former foreign secretary, Government of India, Shyam Saran, delivered a lecture highlighting the role of media and space for arguments. Here’s the full text for the lecture, titled “The Argumentative Indian and India’s Media Culture”:
Janaab Najeeb Jung Sahib, former LG Delhi, Shri Shailesh Dobhal, Editor, Business Standard, Ms Nivedita Mookerji, Executive Editor, Business Standard.
Ms Premila Nazareth Satyanand, Ambassador Alan Nazareth, who is joining us in spirit, the recipients of the Seema Nazareth Award for Excellence in Journalism for 2025. My very warm congratulations to Sanket and to Mohammed Asif Khan.
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,
Thank you for inviting me to deliver the keynote address at the Business Standard Seema Nazareth Award function. Seema was one of the most promising young journalists at Business Standard. Having been brought up in a foreign service household, and being exposed to different peoples and cultures, she brought to her work a rare cosmopolitanism and openness of mind, despite her youth. Fate took her away from this world at the tender age of 24, but we get an intimate glimpse into her personality, her aesthetic sensibility and poetic skills, thanks to a collection of her poems, published by her father, Ambassador Alan Nazareth, under the title Introspections. The last poem in the collection, I Dream of Making a Mark Before I Die, should be a source of inspiration to young journalists following her footsteps in the media domain:
“I dream of making a mark before I die, but
Not in the old way of strict deadlines,
Obsessive achievement and
Relentless fears.
But through honesty, integrity
(not bombastic, but well thought
out and rational) and resilience……”
Honesty, integrity and resilience are really the qualities that successful journalism demands; professionalism must be combined with credibility if a journalist wishes to excel in this most challenging of domains.
Let me offer my sincere felicitations and best wishes to the recipients of the Seema Nazareth Award for Excellence in Journalism and the recipient of the Special Mention Award. I have no doubt that they will live up to the very high standards that the awards recognise.
To mark this special occasion, I have chosen to speak on “The Argumentative Indian and India’s Media Culture.”
It is the Nobel Laureate, Dr Amartya Sen, who introduced The Argumentative Indian to an international readership. Sen’s central thesis was that this country has enjoyed a long and deeply ingrained tradition of heterodoxy, open debate and persistent questioning, through challenging orthodoxy and inculcating a spirit of curiosity. The Upanishads are full of stories which advance philosophical concepts and moral and ethical principles through conversations, debates and sessions of question and answers between sage and acolyte.
Within the Buddhist tradition, too, debate was institutionalised as a core spiritual practice. In the great monastic universities like Nalanda, formal debate was indispensable to the quest for “liberation through wisdom”. Monks rigorously challenged each other’s ideas to systematically dispel ignorance and arrive at a clearer understanding of truth.
In the Indian Nyaya tradition, different types of discourse were described. There was vada — an honest, respectful debate undertaken collaboratively by a proponent and an opponent to discover the truth. In contrast, there was a warning against jalpa — signifying hostile wrangling to defeat the interlocutor; and against vitanda or destructive argumentation meant to humiliate the other side. Jalpa and vitanda were rejected as being devoid of the noble pursuit of truth through a contestation of ideas. The classical Indian ideal has been built on the premise that you persuade through the power of argument and not through the brute force of coercion. The dissenter was not an enemy but a partner in the pursuit of truth.
This brings us to the present day and to the immense responsibility resting on the shoulders of Indian media, which faces unprecedented challenges in our age of conformity.
If the DNA of India is inherently argumentative, pluralistic and dialogue-driven, then the media, as the modern public square, must be the true reflection of that DNA. But current media culture, with a few laudable exceptions, has allowed the art of argument to devolve into jalpa and vitanda rather than uphold the tradition of vada. Driven by algorithmic compulsions, commercial pressures and political polarisation, there is an unmistakable slide into echo chambers. There is a risk of adopting monochromatic approaches, where complex realities are flattened into stark black-and-white narratives and the loudest voice is mistaken for the most persuasive. In a monochromatic media environment, you are either a patriot or a traitor.
A vibrant media culture must be a platform for an exchange of different ideas and different ways of thinking. When a newsroom embraces intellectual diversity and insists on civility, it honours our deepest historical legacy. Only through open, vibrant and stimulating exchange can the media deliver on its core mandate:
First, to inform and educate public opinion. You cannot educate a public if you only feed them what they already believe. True education requires the friction of encountering opposing viewpoints. It requires the nuance of context, the deep historical perspective, and the philosophical reflection that turns mere data into actual knowledge.
Second, to hold power to account. Power thrives in the absence of scrutiny. But more specifically, power thrives when narrative is uniform. When the media champions the right to dissent, it ensures that those in authority are constantly tested by the rigours of public reasoning.
Third, to safeguard democracy. Democracy is not just the mechanical act of voting every five years. As Amartya Sen reminds us, democracy is government by discussion. If the discussion is compromised, then democracy is compromised.
I thank you for your attention.
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