Focus: Did BJP Endorsed By India’s Leading Intellectuals?

By Sukhwinder Singh / Delhi

If there’s one thing that has hit home with the Congress in the past couple of months, it is this: peddling the RTI Act or what Manmohan Singh might have done for the economy more than 20 years back, will not win them the upcoming elections.  It’s a fact the party is acutely aware of and the result of the realisation is a Rs 500 crore campaign that they are reportedly lining up to blow the voters’ mind. It is important to remind ourselves that the party had long known that only aggressive whitewashing of their image can save them and hence produced the Bharat Nirman ad a while back.

Spotlight: Islamic State Readies For Fall Of 'Caliphate'

By SARAH WILLIAMS | INNLIVE

Even as it launches waves of terrorist attacks around the globe, the Islamic State is quietly preparing its followers for the eventual collapse of the caliphate it proclaimed with great fanfare two years ago.

In public messages and in recent actions in Syria, the group's leaders are acknowledging the terrorist organization's declining fortunes on the battlefield while bracing for the possibility that its remaining strongholds could fall.

OUTSOURCING: ARE MAGAZINES NEXT?

By M H AHSAN

"We move medical writing offshore. And for that, I apologize to all the freelance medical writers I have worked with in the past (and paid handsomely!) because now my company can do what they do, but for half the price," writes Lombardo, whose post-Whittle positions have included editor-in-chief at WebMD. "I won't be speaking at the American Medical Writers Association meetings anytime soon because I don't own a Kevlar vest."

Another American entrepreneur, Ted Fong, sends out letters to small publishers soliciting clients for his Manila-based company, Boma, offering "design, layout, content development and advertising telesales," at a price that's half of what it typically costs to have the work done in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Office Tiger, a New York-based publishing services company that does most of its work in Chennai, India, is building a design studio in India and bringing over a designer from the U.S. to run it. The firm hopes to attract more U.S. magazine clients for its full range of production work. "I think where publishers would most likely use us as a starting point would be design execution, where we are working with designs that have been established," says Michelle Breault, senior vice president of content and prepress services. She expects more publishers to turn to the firm for original work "as we migrate to that broader design capability."

It's an increasingly familiar picture: the transfer of work that was once done by full-time employees in the U.S. to overseas contractors for a fraction of the price. It's a fait accompli in customer service, direct marketing and information technology. Now, it's the magazine business's turn. Editorial, design, production and advertising functions are all being performed cheaper - and some contractors and publishers claim better - overseas.

The move abroad is just beginning, but experts believe the shift overseas is inevitable. For publishers that have already slashed staff, reduced editorial pages and shifted work onto freelancers in place of full-time staff, this represents the next frontier in cost-cutting. "I think the opportunity is that one can inherently make a new magazine start-up less expensive," says Atul Vashista, CEO of outsourcing consultancy firm NeoIT. "One can reduce the production costs of putting a magazine out."

Clearly, magazine production presents many of the same conditions that provided the offshore opportunity for other industries. Publishers are already accustomed to telecommuting sales reps, near-virtual editorial staff, outsourced art direction and design, outsourced Web programming, outsourced circulation fulfillment, etc. That can put magazine jobs into the great pool of the potentially offshored. According to a report published by the University of California, Berkeley last fall, as many as 14 million jobs could be shifted outside the U.S. by 2015. None of the research focused exclusively on the magazine business, but the report made clear just how vulnerable jobs in the industries that have the following characteristics are: "The lack of face-to-face customer service, work processes that enable telecommuting and Internet work, high wage differentials between countries, a high information content, low social networking requirements and low set-up costs."

That list applies to a number of jobs in an industry that is increasingly migrating online - especially for a freelance copy editor or proofreader working out of his home for editors he's never met. Copy editors and graphic designers are among the employees listed as being at moderate risk of losing their jobs to overseas competitors by job counseling Website careerplanner.com. "I was using a copywriter to write a couple of pages for me and I found she was farming some of it out," says Michael Robinson, founder and owner of careerplanner.com. "Her proofreader was local, but there was no reason she couldn't send it to India."

Threat or Opportunity?The current face of magazine offshoring can be glimpsed in the moist puppy dog eyes staring out from the cover of the latest issue of Fido Friendly Magazine, a quarterly for people who travel with their dogs. The magazine's co-founder and editor-in-chief, Nick Sveslovsky, who started the publication with his mother in 2001, answered a solicitation from Boma last year. He says that since the magazine was created, "I had been doing the design and production all myself, and we just didn't have the resources financially to outsource to someone in the U.S. where the prices are ridiculous." Sveslovsky estimates that by using Boma he pays about half what it would cost him to have the work done stateside. He sends Boma the raw material - including a photo of the next issue's "cover dog" - and designers in the Philippines do the rest. The arrangement frees him up to concentrate on editorial and increasing the magazine's frequency. "With Boma, it'll happen a lot sooner than I would have thought, hopefully pretty soon," Sveslovsky says.

The same offer from Boma evoked a far different reaction when it arrived on the desk of Samuel Pennington, publisher of Maine Antique Digest. "I live in a small town and have employees who have been with me 25 years and longer," he says. "I just couldn't see downsizing." With employee pay and benefits making up more than one-third of his costs, he acknowledges that he probably could save money by outsourcing. But he considers such thinking shortsighted. "If everything is overseas, who's going to be able to buy anything?" asks Pennington, rhetorically. "Henry Ford shocked everyone by paying his employees a living wage, but he did it because he wanted people to be able to buy his cars."

Fido Friendly and Maine Antique Digest are typical of the publications Boma is targeting to build its magazine business (until now the company's main focus had been on preparing marketing materials), in that they have circulations under 40,000 and serve a strong niche market. "Right now we go after the smaller magazines because they're the ones who have the biggest needs and are the most cost-conscious," says Fong, who mailed a solicitation to 350 U.S. publishers in January and is preparing to send another.

Boma charges $50 per page for layout and design, a price that includes sending the pages electronically to clients three times for proofing. Fong can afford to keep the price low because he typically pays his employees a fraction of what they would earn for comparable work in the U.S. - about $12,000 a year on average for a job that might pay $60,000 in the states. So far, with only three magazine clients, Boma is tiny, but Fong says he's in discussions with others and has turned down some interested publishers whom he didn't consider financially viable. He also has begun offering advertising services to magazines, including design and telephone sales.
With Fido Friendly, he's using call centers to qualify leads by contacting hotels to find out details, such as whether they allow pets and what kind of accommodation they offer. From there, it's up to the two full-time telephone sales people Fong employs to close the deal. He admits his sales staff is on a learning curve, but claims he can dramatically cut the costs of bringing in advertising. "The kind of customers we're going after are not going to hire sales people and send them out on calls," says Fong. "The way of the future is to close business over the phone, especially for ads that are less than $4,000 or $5,000 a page."

Offshore Company Has Designs on U.S. MagsIf U.S. magazine workers only had to contend with Boma, there wouldn't be much to worry about. But there are bigger players moving into this field. Office Tiger, for example, has a staff of 1,650 in India, and offices in New York and London. It was founded in 1999 to provide research, analysis and production services for law firms and investment banks, among other companies. Tiger quickly moved into the production of annual reports and prospectuses. From there, it's not much of a leap to provide the same type of support for magazines and, in fact, the company has started to do so on a limited basis, says co-CEO and co-founder Joe Sigelman.

With its new design studio, the company will be able to perform many of the functions traditionally done in-house or outsourced to a domestic company, says Breault. That includes high-end creative work. She adds that the company expects to gain a publisher's confidence by starting out providing routine design and production work, which magazines have plenty of. "If you look at creating a directory, for example, what you do is very much take a style and develop scripts to lay that out and what you're doing is really merging data to a predefined layout," she says.

Boma and OfficeTiger reflect a pattern among companies building up a business in offshore magazine work. They have established themselves in other fields - marketing, advertising and financial analysis - that require skills that are transferable to magazine publishing, such as writing, researching, copyediting, layout and design. By the time these companies begin courting magazine publishers, they have not only built up a track record demonstrating those core skills, they have already set up their facilities and technology and their sales and customer services staff. Their ability to transfer their success from related fields into magazine publishing will likely encourage competitors to make the same jump.

But how much of it really translates to magazine work? Can a copy editor in India understand the nuances of style well enough to make the words flow smoothly in, say, a magazine for wine connoisseurs in California? Can a graphic designer in the Philippines create a pleasing look for an American hotel chain's custom publication? And what about the intangibles - the trust and communication that only comes from face-to-face contact.

"Most of the time, even among bigger accounts that we've gone after, you're really dealing with someone in a very personal one-on-one relationship," says Rob Sugar, president of Aurus Design in Silver Spring, Md. "So it matters to them that you're not that far away." Aurus designs and produces custom publications for organizations including the American Bus Association and the American Film Institute.

He says it would be logistically possible to perform the functions Aurus does offshore (he has clients in other states that he rarely sees in person), but he doubts overseas workers would have the right cultural sensibility for the job. "Knowing [a client] in a more intimate way is something that's very important. I think there's no substitute for understanding what their needs are."
Boma's employees in the Philippines ran into a cultural barrier when they began producing Fido Friendly. The concept of traveling with dogs was alien to the designers. Fong, who was born and raised in California, says it's his job to explain such cultural differences to his staff.

Journal Work Migrating OverseasProfessional journals such as Molecular Cancer Research (from the American Association of Cancer Research) and the APG Bulletin) from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists) are already flocking to offshore vendors. Just ask Inera, a Massachusetts company that sells editorial and production software to publishers. "We have one competitor and it's not another software product. It's outsourcing," says Ken Carson, Inera's vice president. In the last year and a half, the company has lost several big potential deals because publishers found that instead of investing in software, they could outsource work to India or the Philippines and still save up to 80 percent off what it would cost to do the work in-house. Outmatched on price, Inera tries to compete on quality, appealing to publishers who insist on the control of keeping the work in-house, says Carson.


One of the companies giving Inera competition is SPI Publisher Services, which does prepress services such as layout and copyediting, as well as file conversion from print to electronic format for professional and scholarly journals in Manila. SPI's revenues have been growing 50 percent a year for the past two years and are on track to hit $15 million this year.

"The economy being what it is, the attractiveness of offshore vendors is growing," says Frank Stumpf, president and COO of the company, which has its U.S. headquarters in Ashland, Va. He maintains that offshore doesn't just mean cheaper; it can also mean better because overseas companies can afford to put more workers on a project to get a job done faster and with greater attention to detail. So far, the company has not expanded from journals to consumer or trade magazines, but Stumpf says SPI is eyeing such publications for future growth. "I think there's more and more opportunity," he says. "Copyediting is one of the more labor intensive parts of the magazine business, so it's a highly likely thing for people to consider moving offshore."
But Barbara Wallraff, a language columnist for the Atlantic Monthly and editor of the Copy Editor Newsletter, says copyediting is too sophisticated a function to be farmed out to someone in another country. "If it's quality that the companies care about for the great majority of copyediting applications, offshoring wouldn't be the way to go," she says. "So we need to do a good job of explaining why good, solid domestic editing does have value."

Wallraff may be right - certainly a top literary/current events magazine like The Atlantic is unlikely to trust the nuance of language of top writers to unseen contractors. But many magazines are looking for something far simpler: clear, error-free copy. For example, Dowden Health Media, a custom publisher of medical information for both professional and consumer audiences, says it is happy to hire doctors in India to fact check its consumer publications.
The doctors check the stories against the medical literature to make sure the articles are scientifically accurate. "There's an extra level of scrutiny, putting an extra brain on the case for each article," says Mark Dowden, senior vice president and publisher. "It's not so much a matter of keeping absolute errors from going through, as it is providing extra editorial input that can be used in final editing to confirm that everything in the article is just so from a scientific viewpoint." Dowden declined to say how much he pays for the service, but said it's less than what it would cost to hire a freelance fact checker, let alone an M.D., in the U.S.

Those doctors come by way of MD Writers, the company started by Lombardo. Lombardo says he has six Indian physicians under contract who write, research, copyedit and fact check material for consumer and professional audiences. MD Writers supplies content for Websites, ghost writes articles for peer-reviewed journals and prepares material for continuing education courses.

For one client, a Website for physicians, the doctors under contract with MD Writers review the professional journals each week and write summaries of their findings. Lombardo, who says the company has six clients including Dowden (but declined to name the others), says the only thing medical journalists do that the doctors he works with don't is call sources to report on a story.
To find doctors who could write, he advertised on two Websites: Monsterindia.com and Timesofindia.com. He got 120 responses. Doctors typically make $1,200 to $2,000 a month in India, so the moonlighting offers an attractive way to supplement their income, says Lombardo. He gave the applicants writing tests. "I thought it would take me 100 tests to find four good writers," he says. "After 70 tests I stopped. I had a pool of 15 writers."Granted, the Indian doctors wrote with a British accent, but Lombardo says it took him only three months to train them to write American-style copy. And he did it all by e-mail from his office in Atlanta. Lombardo has never been to India.

OUTSOURCING: ARE MAGAZINES NEXT?

By M H AHSAN

"We move medical writing offshore. And for that, I apologize to all the freelance medical writers I have worked with in the past (and paid handsomely!) because now my company can do what they do, but for half the price," writes Lombardo, whose post-Whittle positions have included editor-in-chief at WebMD. "I won't be speaking at the American Medical Writers Association meetings anytime soon because I don't own a Kevlar vest."

Another American entrepreneur, Ted Fong, sends out letters to small publishers soliciting clients for his Manila-based company, Boma, offering "design, layout, content development and advertising telesales," at a price that's half of what it typically costs to have the work done in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Office Tiger, a New York-based publishing services company that does most of its work in Chennai, India, is building a design studio in India and bringing over a designer from the U.S. to run it. The firm hopes to attract more U.S. magazine clients for its full range of production work. "I think where publishers would most likely use us as a starting point would be design execution, where we are working with designs that have been established," says Michelle Breault, senior vice president of content and prepress services. She expects more publishers to turn to the firm for original work "as we migrate to that broader design capability."

It's an increasingly familiar picture: the transfer of work that was once done by full-time employees in the U.S. to overseas contractors for a fraction of the price. It's a fait accompli in customer service, direct marketing and information technology. Now, it's the magazine business's turn. Editorial, design, production and advertising functions are all being performed cheaper - and some contractors and publishers claim better - overseas.

The move abroad is just beginning, but experts believe the shift overseas is inevitable. For publishers that have already slashed staff, reduced editorial pages and shifted work onto freelancers in place of full-time staff, this represents the next frontier in cost-cutting. "I think the opportunity is that one can inherently make a new magazine start-up less expensive," says Atul Vashista, CEO of outsourcing consultancy firm NeoIT. "One can reduce the production costs of putting a magazine out."

Clearly, magazine production presents many of the same conditions that provided the offshore opportunity for other industries. Publishers are already accustomed to telecommuting sales reps, near-virtual editorial staff, outsourced art direction and design, outsourced Web programming, outsourced circulation fulfillment, etc. That can put magazine jobs into the great pool of the potentially offshored. According to a report published by the University of California, Berkeley last fall, as many as 14 million jobs could be shifted outside the U.S. by 2015. None of the research focused exclusively on the magazine business, but the report made clear just how vulnerable jobs in the industries that have the following characteristics are: "The lack of face-to-face customer service, work processes that enable telecommuting and Internet work, high wage differentials between countries, a high information content, low social networking requirements and low set-up costs."

That list applies to a number of jobs in an industry that is increasingly migrating online - especially for a freelance copy editor or proofreader working out of his home for editors he's never met. Copy editors and graphic designers are among the employees listed as being at moderate risk of losing their jobs to overseas competitors by job counseling Website careerplanner.com. "I was using a copywriter to write a couple of pages for me and I found she was farming some of it out," says Michael Robinson, founder and owner of careerplanner.com. "Her proofreader was local, but there was no reason she couldn't send it to India."

Threat or Opportunity?The current face of magazine offshoring can be glimpsed in the moist puppy dog eyes staring out from the cover of the latest issue of Fido Friendly Magazine, a quarterly for people who travel with their dogs. The magazine's co-founder and editor-in-chief, Nick Sveslovsky, who started the publication with his mother in 2001, answered a solicitation from Boma last year. He says that since the magazine was created, "I had been doing the design and production all myself, and we just didn't have the resources financially to outsource to someone in the U.S. where the prices are ridiculous." Sveslovsky estimates that by using Boma he pays about half what it would cost him to have the work done stateside. He sends Boma the raw material - including a photo of the next issue's "cover dog" - and designers in the Philippines do the rest. The arrangement frees him up to concentrate on editorial and increasing the magazine's frequency. "With Boma, it'll happen a lot sooner than I would have thought, hopefully pretty soon," Sveslovsky says.

The same offer from Boma evoked a far different reaction when it arrived on the desk of Samuel Pennington, publisher of Maine Antique Digest. "I live in a small town and have employees who have been with me 25 years and longer," he says. "I just couldn't see downsizing." With employee pay and benefits making up more than one-third of his costs, he acknowledges that he probably could save money by outsourcing. But he considers such thinking shortsighted. "If everything is overseas, who's going to be able to buy anything?" asks Pennington, rhetorically. "Henry Ford shocked everyone by paying his employees a living wage, but he did it because he wanted people to be able to buy his cars."

Fido Friendly and Maine Antique Digest are typical of the publications Boma is targeting to build its magazine business (until now the company's main focus had been on preparing marketing materials), in that they have circulations under 40,000 and serve a strong niche market. "Right now we go after the smaller magazines because they're the ones who have the biggest needs and are the most cost-conscious," says Fong, who mailed a solicitation to 350 U.S. publishers in January and is preparing to send another.

Boma charges $50 per page for layout and design, a price that includes sending the pages electronically to clients three times for proofing. Fong can afford to keep the price low because he typically pays his employees a fraction of what they would earn for comparable work in the U.S. - about $12,000 a year on average for a job that might pay $60,000 in the states. So far, with only three magazine clients, Boma is tiny, but Fong says he's in discussions with others and has turned down some interested publishers whom he didn't consider financially viable. He also has begun offering advertising services to magazines, including design and telephone sales.
With Fido Friendly, he's using call centers to qualify leads by contacting hotels to find out details, such as whether they allow pets and what kind of accommodation they offer. From there, it's up to the two full-time telephone sales people Fong employs to close the deal. He admits his sales staff is on a learning curve, but claims he can dramatically cut the costs of bringing in advertising. "The kind of customers we're going after are not going to hire sales people and send them out on calls," says Fong. "The way of the future is to close business over the phone, especially for ads that are less than $4,000 or $5,000 a page."

Offshore Company Has Designs on U.S. MagsIf U.S. magazine workers only had to contend with Boma, there wouldn't be much to worry about. But there are bigger players moving into this field. Office Tiger, for example, has a staff of 1,650 in India, and offices in New York and London. It was founded in 1999 to provide research, analysis and production services for law firms and investment banks, among other companies. Tiger quickly moved into the production of annual reports and prospectuses. From there, it's not much of a leap to provide the same type of support for magazines and, in fact, the company has started to do so on a limited basis, says co-CEO and co-founder Joe Sigelman.

With its new design studio, the company will be able to perform many of the functions traditionally done in-house or outsourced to a domestic company, says Breault. That includes high-end creative work. She adds that the company expects to gain a publisher's confidence by starting out providing routine design and production work, which magazines have plenty of. "If you look at creating a directory, for example, what you do is very much take a style and develop scripts to lay that out and what you're doing is really merging data to a predefined layout," she says.

Boma and OfficeTiger reflect a pattern among companies building up a business in offshore magazine work. They have established themselves in other fields - marketing, advertising and financial analysis - that require skills that are transferable to magazine publishing, such as writing, researching, copyediting, layout and design. By the time these companies begin courting magazine publishers, they have not only built up a track record demonstrating those core skills, they have already set up their facilities and technology and their sales and customer services staff. Their ability to transfer their success from related fields into magazine publishing will likely encourage competitors to make the same jump.

But how much of it really translates to magazine work? Can a copy editor in India understand the nuances of style well enough to make the words flow smoothly in, say, a magazine for wine connoisseurs in California? Can a graphic designer in the Philippines create a pleasing look for an American hotel chain's custom publication? And what about the intangibles - the trust and communication that only comes from face-to-face contact.

"Most of the time, even among bigger accounts that we've gone after, you're really dealing with someone in a very personal one-on-one relationship," says Rob Sugar, president of Aurus Design in Silver Spring, Md. "So it matters to them that you're not that far away." Aurus designs and produces custom publications for organizations including the American Bus Association and the American Film Institute.

He says it would be logistically possible to perform the functions Aurus does offshore (he has clients in other states that he rarely sees in person), but he doubts overseas workers would have the right cultural sensibility for the job. "Knowing [a client] in a more intimate way is something that's very important. I think there's no substitute for understanding what their needs are."
Boma's employees in the Philippines ran into a cultural barrier when they began producing Fido Friendly. The concept of traveling with dogs was alien to the designers. Fong, who was born and raised in California, says it's his job to explain such cultural differences to his staff.

Journal Work Migrating OverseasProfessional journals such as Molecular Cancer Research (from the American Association of Cancer Research) and the APG Bulletin) from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists) are already flocking to offshore vendors. Just ask Inera, a Massachusetts company that sells editorial and production software to publishers. "We have one competitor and it's not another software product. It's outsourcing," says Ken Carson, Inera's vice president. In the last year and a half, the company has lost several big potential deals because publishers found that instead of investing in software, they could outsource work to India or the Philippines and still save up to 80 percent off what it would cost to do the work in-house. Outmatched on price, Inera tries to compete on quality, appealing to publishers who insist on the control of keeping the work in-house, says Carson.


One of the companies giving Inera competition is SPI Publisher Services, which does prepress services such as layout and copyediting, as well as file conversion from print to electronic format for professional and scholarly journals in Manila. SPI's revenues have been growing 50 percent a year for the past two years and are on track to hit $15 million this year.

"The economy being what it is, the attractiveness of offshore vendors is growing," says Frank Stumpf, president and COO of the company, which has its U.S. headquarters in Ashland, Va. He maintains that offshore doesn't just mean cheaper; it can also mean better because overseas companies can afford to put more workers on a project to get a job done faster and with greater attention to detail. So far, the company has not expanded from journals to consumer or trade magazines, but Stumpf says SPI is eyeing such publications for future growth. "I think there's more and more opportunity," he says. "Copyediting is one of the more labor intensive parts of the magazine business, so it's a highly likely thing for people to consider moving offshore."
But Barbara Wallraff, a language columnist for the Atlantic Monthly and editor of the Copy Editor Newsletter, says copyediting is too sophisticated a function to be farmed out to someone in another country. "If it's quality that the companies care about for the great majority of copyediting applications, offshoring wouldn't be the way to go," she says. "So we need to do a good job of explaining why good, solid domestic editing does have value."

Wallraff may be right - certainly a top literary/current events magazine like The Atlantic is unlikely to trust the nuance of language of top writers to unseen contractors. But many magazines are looking for something far simpler: clear, error-free copy. For example, Dowden Health Media, a custom publisher of medical information for both professional and consumer audiences, says it is happy to hire doctors in India to fact check its consumer publications.
The doctors check the stories against the medical literature to make sure the articles are scientifically accurate. "There's an extra level of scrutiny, putting an extra brain on the case for each article," says Mark Dowden, senior vice president and publisher. "It's not so much a matter of keeping absolute errors from going through, as it is providing extra editorial input that can be used in final editing to confirm that everything in the article is just so from a scientific viewpoint." Dowden declined to say how much he pays for the service, but said it's less than what it would cost to hire a freelance fact checker, let alone an M.D., in the U.S.

Those doctors come by way of MD Writers, the company started by Lombardo. Lombardo says he has six Indian physicians under contract who write, research, copyedit and fact check material for consumer and professional audiences. MD Writers supplies content for Websites, ghost writes articles for peer-reviewed journals and prepares material for continuing education courses.

For one client, a Website for physicians, the doctors under contract with MD Writers review the professional journals each week and write summaries of their findings. Lombardo, who says the company has six clients including Dowden (but declined to name the others), says the only thing medical journalists do that the doctors he works with don't is call sources to report on a story.
To find doctors who could write, he advertised on two Websites: Monsterindia.com and Timesofindia.com. He got 120 responses. Doctors typically make $1,200 to $2,000 a month in India, so the moonlighting offers an attractive way to supplement their income, says Lombardo. He gave the applicants writing tests. "I thought it would take me 100 tests to find four good writers," he says. "After 70 tests I stopped. I had a pool of 15 writers."Granted, the Indian doctors wrote with a British accent, but Lombardo says it took him only three months to train them to write American-style copy. And he did it all by e-mail from his office in Atlanta. Lombardo has never been to India.

OUTSOURCING: ARE MAGAZINES NEXT?

By M H AHSAN

"We move medical writing offshore. And for that, I apologize to all the freelance medical writers I have worked with in the past (and paid handsomely!) because now my company can do what they do, but for half the price," writes Lombardo, whose post-Whittle positions have included editor-in-chief at WebMD. "I won't be speaking at the American Medical Writers Association meetings anytime soon because I don't own a Kevlar vest."

Another American entrepreneur, Ted Fong, sends out letters to small publishers soliciting clients for his Manila-based company, Boma, offering "design, layout, content development and advertising telesales," at a price that's half of what it typically costs to have the work done in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Office Tiger, a New York-based publishing services company that does most of its work in Chennai, India, is building a design studio in India and bringing over a designer from the U.S. to run it. The firm hopes to attract more U.S. magazine clients for its full range of production work. "I think where publishers would most likely use us as a starting point would be design execution, where we are working with designs that have been established," says Michelle Breault, senior vice president of content and prepress services. She expects more publishers to turn to the firm for original work "as we migrate to that broader design capability."

It's an increasingly familiar picture: the transfer of work that was once done by full-time employees in the U.S. to overseas contractors for a fraction of the price. It's a fait accompli in customer service, direct marketing and information technology. Now, it's the magazine business's turn. Editorial, design, production and advertising functions are all being performed cheaper - and some contractors and publishers claim better - overseas.

The move abroad is just beginning, but experts believe the shift overseas is inevitable. For publishers that have already slashed staff, reduced editorial pages and shifted work onto freelancers in place of full-time staff, this represents the next frontier in cost-cutting. "I think the opportunity is that one can inherently make a new magazine start-up less expensive," says Atul Vashista, CEO of outsourcing consultancy firm NeoIT. "One can reduce the production costs of putting a magazine out."

Clearly, magazine production presents many of the same conditions that provided the offshore opportunity for other industries. Publishers are already accustomed to telecommuting sales reps, near-virtual editorial staff, outsourced art direction and design, outsourced Web programming, outsourced circulation fulfillment, etc. That can put magazine jobs into the great pool of the potentially offshored. According to a report published by the University of California, Berkeley last fall, as many as 14 million jobs could be shifted outside the U.S. by 2015. None of the research focused exclusively on the magazine business, but the report made clear just how vulnerable jobs in the industries that have the following characteristics are: "The lack of face-to-face customer service, work processes that enable telecommuting and Internet work, high wage differentials between countries, a high information content, low social networking requirements and low set-up costs."

That list applies to a number of jobs in an industry that is increasingly migrating online - especially for a freelance copy editor or proofreader working out of his home for editors he's never met. Copy editors and graphic designers are among the employees listed as being at moderate risk of losing their jobs to overseas competitors by job counseling Website careerplanner.com. "I was using a copywriter to write a couple of pages for me and I found she was farming some of it out," says Michael Robinson, founder and owner of careerplanner.com. "Her proofreader was local, but there was no reason she couldn't send it to India."

Threat or Opportunity?The current face of magazine offshoring can be glimpsed in the moist puppy dog eyes staring out from the cover of the latest issue of Fido Friendly Magazine, a quarterly for people who travel with their dogs. The magazine's co-founder and editor-in-chief, Nick Sveslovsky, who started the publication with his mother in 2001, answered a solicitation from Boma last year. He says that since the magazine was created, "I had been doing the design and production all myself, and we just didn't have the resources financially to outsource to someone in the U.S. where the prices are ridiculous." Sveslovsky estimates that by using Boma he pays about half what it would cost him to have the work done stateside. He sends Boma the raw material - including a photo of the next issue's "cover dog" - and designers in the Philippines do the rest. The arrangement frees him up to concentrate on editorial and increasing the magazine's frequency. "With Boma, it'll happen a lot sooner than I would have thought, hopefully pretty soon," Sveslovsky says.

The same offer from Boma evoked a far different reaction when it arrived on the desk of Samuel Pennington, publisher of Maine Antique Digest. "I live in a small town and have employees who have been with me 25 years and longer," he says. "I just couldn't see downsizing." With employee pay and benefits making up more than one-third of his costs, he acknowledges that he probably could save money by outsourcing. But he considers such thinking shortsighted. "If everything is overseas, who's going to be able to buy anything?" asks Pennington, rhetorically. "Henry Ford shocked everyone by paying his employees a living wage, but he did it because he wanted people to be able to buy his cars."

Fido Friendly and Maine Antique Digest are typical of the publications Boma is targeting to build its magazine business (until now the company's main focus had been on preparing marketing materials), in that they have circulations under 40,000 and serve a strong niche market. "Right now we go after the smaller magazines because they're the ones who have the biggest needs and are the most cost-conscious," says Fong, who mailed a solicitation to 350 U.S. publishers in January and is preparing to send another.

Boma charges $50 per page for layout and design, a price that includes sending the pages electronically to clients three times for proofing. Fong can afford to keep the price low because he typically pays his employees a fraction of what they would earn for comparable work in the U.S. - about $12,000 a year on average for a job that might pay $60,000 in the states. So far, with only three magazine clients, Boma is tiny, but Fong says he's in discussions with others and has turned down some interested publishers whom he didn't consider financially viable. He also has begun offering advertising services to magazines, including design and telephone sales.
With Fido Friendly, he's using call centers to qualify leads by contacting hotels to find out details, such as whether they allow pets and what kind of accommodation they offer. From there, it's up to the two full-time telephone sales people Fong employs to close the deal. He admits his sales staff is on a learning curve, but claims he can dramatically cut the costs of bringing in advertising. "The kind of customers we're going after are not going to hire sales people and send them out on calls," says Fong. "The way of the future is to close business over the phone, especially for ads that are less than $4,000 or $5,000 a page."

Offshore Company Has Designs on U.S. MagsIf U.S. magazine workers only had to contend with Boma, there wouldn't be much to worry about. But there are bigger players moving into this field. Office Tiger, for example, has a staff of 1,650 in India, and offices in New York and London. It was founded in 1999 to provide research, analysis and production services for law firms and investment banks, among other companies. Tiger quickly moved into the production of annual reports and prospectuses. From there, it's not much of a leap to provide the same type of support for magazines and, in fact, the company has started to do so on a limited basis, says co-CEO and co-founder Joe Sigelman.

With its new design studio, the company will be able to perform many of the functions traditionally done in-house or outsourced to a domestic company, says Breault. That includes high-end creative work. She adds that the company expects to gain a publisher's confidence by starting out providing routine design and production work, which magazines have plenty of. "If you look at creating a directory, for example, what you do is very much take a style and develop scripts to lay that out and what you're doing is really merging data to a predefined layout," she says.

Boma and OfficeTiger reflect a pattern among companies building up a business in offshore magazine work. They have established themselves in other fields - marketing, advertising and financial analysis - that require skills that are transferable to magazine publishing, such as writing, researching, copyediting, layout and design. By the time these companies begin courting magazine publishers, they have not only built up a track record demonstrating those core skills, they have already set up their facilities and technology and their sales and customer services staff. Their ability to transfer their success from related fields into magazine publishing will likely encourage competitors to make the same jump.

But how much of it really translates to magazine work? Can a copy editor in India understand the nuances of style well enough to make the words flow smoothly in, say, a magazine for wine connoisseurs in California? Can a graphic designer in the Philippines create a pleasing look for an American hotel chain's custom publication? And what about the intangibles - the trust and communication that only comes from face-to-face contact.

"Most of the time, even among bigger accounts that we've gone after, you're really dealing with someone in a very personal one-on-one relationship," says Rob Sugar, president of Aurus Design in Silver Spring, Md. "So it matters to them that you're not that far away." Aurus designs and produces custom publications for organizations including the American Bus Association and the American Film Institute.

He says it would be logistically possible to perform the functions Aurus does offshore (he has clients in other states that he rarely sees in person), but he doubts overseas workers would have the right cultural sensibility for the job. "Knowing [a client] in a more intimate way is something that's very important. I think there's no substitute for understanding what their needs are."
Boma's employees in the Philippines ran into a cultural barrier when they began producing Fido Friendly. The concept of traveling with dogs was alien to the designers. Fong, who was born and raised in California, says it's his job to explain such cultural differences to his staff.

Journal Work Migrating OverseasProfessional journals such as Molecular Cancer Research (from the American Association of Cancer Research) and the APG Bulletin) from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists) are already flocking to offshore vendors. Just ask Inera, a Massachusetts company that sells editorial and production software to publishers. "We have one competitor and it's not another software product. It's outsourcing," says Ken Carson, Inera's vice president. In the last year and a half, the company has lost several big potential deals because publishers found that instead of investing in software, they could outsource work to India or the Philippines and still save up to 80 percent off what it would cost to do the work in-house. Outmatched on price, Inera tries to compete on quality, appealing to publishers who insist on the control of keeping the work in-house, says Carson.


One of the companies giving Inera competition is SPI Publisher Services, which does prepress services such as layout and copyediting, as well as file conversion from print to electronic format for professional and scholarly journals in Manila. SPI's revenues have been growing 50 percent a year for the past two years and are on track to hit $15 million this year.

"The economy being what it is, the attractiveness of offshore vendors is growing," says Frank Stumpf, president and COO of the company, which has its U.S. headquarters in Ashland, Va. He maintains that offshore doesn't just mean cheaper; it can also mean better because overseas companies can afford to put more workers on a project to get a job done faster and with greater attention to detail. So far, the company has not expanded from journals to consumer or trade magazines, but Stumpf says SPI is eyeing such publications for future growth. "I think there's more and more opportunity," he says. "Copyediting is one of the more labor intensive parts of the magazine business, so it's a highly likely thing for people to consider moving offshore."
But Barbara Wallraff, a language columnist for the Atlantic Monthly and editor of the Copy Editor Newsletter, says copyediting is too sophisticated a function to be farmed out to someone in another country. "If it's quality that the companies care about for the great majority of copyediting applications, offshoring wouldn't be the way to go," she says. "So we need to do a good job of explaining why good, solid domestic editing does have value."

Wallraff may be right - certainly a top literary/current events magazine like The Atlantic is unlikely to trust the nuance of language of top writers to unseen contractors. But many magazines are looking for something far simpler: clear, error-free copy. For example, Dowden Health Media, a custom publisher of medical information for both professional and consumer audiences, says it is happy to hire doctors in India to fact check its consumer publications.
The doctors check the stories against the medical literature to make sure the articles are scientifically accurate. "There's an extra level of scrutiny, putting an extra brain on the case for each article," says Mark Dowden, senior vice president and publisher. "It's not so much a matter of keeping absolute errors from going through, as it is providing extra editorial input that can be used in final editing to confirm that everything in the article is just so from a scientific viewpoint." Dowden declined to say how much he pays for the service, but said it's less than what it would cost to hire a freelance fact checker, let alone an M.D., in the U.S.

Those doctors come by way of MD Writers, the company started by Lombardo. Lombardo says he has six Indian physicians under contract who write, research, copyedit and fact check material for consumer and professional audiences. MD Writers supplies content for Websites, ghost writes articles for peer-reviewed journals and prepares material for continuing education courses.

For one client, a Website for physicians, the doctors under contract with MD Writers review the professional journals each week and write summaries of their findings. Lombardo, who says the company has six clients including Dowden (but declined to name the others), says the only thing medical journalists do that the doctors he works with don't is call sources to report on a story.
To find doctors who could write, he advertised on two Websites: Monsterindia.com and Timesofindia.com. He got 120 responses. Doctors typically make $1,200 to $2,000 a month in India, so the moonlighting offers an attractive way to supplement their income, says Lombardo. He gave the applicants writing tests. "I thought it would take me 100 tests to find four good writers," he says. "After 70 tests I stopped. I had a pool of 15 writers."Granted, the Indian doctors wrote with a British accent, but Lombardo says it took him only three months to train them to write American-style copy. And he did it all by e-mail from his office in Atlanta. Lombardo has never been to India.

Common 'Content Mistakes' Which Hurts Your Website

You finally have that perfect website design, and you’re anticipating what feels like an influx of traffic ahead when your doors open on the new design. Are you waiting and waiting, with dropping expectations, as your anticipatory hopes aren’t met? Unfortunately, you’re not alone. Many times new designs get released and a perfectly designed website fails attracting the huge audience hoped for.

A beautiful design is an excellent start, but what are you doing about content? Even if you’re an online business newbie, you’ve certainly heard the old but true cliché that content is king.

Tips for Writing an Op-ed Article

By M H Ahssan

If you have an opinion about current events-political, social, or otherwise-you have probably considered writing an op-ed article for local or national newspapers. Op-ed pieces allow writers, both amateur and professional alike, to participate in public discourse about the issues that are most important to them.

Writing an opposite editorial (op-ed) article is also a great way for an aspiring writer to break into the business and capture the eye of editors. Traditionally placed on the page opposite the editorial section, op-ed articles are written in the same tone as an editorial piece, but from the point of view of an individual writer. Often, this writer is not associated with the publication, or part of its regular staff of columnists and contributors.

The best op-ed writers are those who keep up with the news, and are able to write valid contributions to current topics. Newspapers focus on relevant journalism, and readers will not want to waste their time on articles that are based on outdated and tired arguments. If you have a fresh slant or new approach, go for it. Often, well-written op-ed pieces are the precursors to lively discussion in other media outlets, such as talk shows, news commentators, and news networks' round-table talks.

Below is a list of some of the basics involved with writing or editing an effective op-ed article:

1. Keep current. The easiest way to get your op-ed article published is to write about something that is currently relevant in headline news. After a story has been written about numerous times, editors-as well as readers-will tire of it and consider it old news. Additionally, an op-ed piece about the condition of the city's roads is hardly relevant when that same city is currently facing a crackdown on political corruption in the mayor's office. Op-ed editors know what readers want to read, and will be more likely to publish your op-ed article if you take the time to consider your audience's interests carefully.

2. Brevity is vital. Newspaper editors generally leave a space big enough for 700-750 words for an op-ed piece, and you have to be able to say a lot in that span to get their attention. A way to keep yourself on track is to remember to focus on one key point or argument, and save the multi-dimensional diatribe against all of society's woes for another outlet (or multiple op-eds). In many cases, if you send in an op-ed article that is considerably longer, the editor will immediately refuse it due to not having the time to go back and forth with you in cutting the word count.

3. Hook your reader. Academics, who are accustomed to writing scholarly papers, tend to have an especially hard time with this one. The opening sentence needs to capture the reader's attention, and this rarely happens in a roundabout way. The easiest hooks are the ones that begin a story, or make a blanket statement that someone might find humorous or intriguing. Think of Charles Dickens' opening lines in A Tale of Two Cities-"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Don't take time to get the ball rolling or get your point across-do it from the opening lines of your article. You'll find that this approach always works best in getting the readers (and editor's) attention.

4. Stick to arguing one point. The op-ed article is not the place to take on the world's problems. It's not really even the place to offer your own five-point plan for fixing the city's budget crises, or for bringing an end to corruption in government. Readers are drawn into op-ed articles because of the honesty of narrative, and simplicity of the argument, and the statements that will make them stop and think for a moment that maybe-just maybe-you have a valid point.

5. Avoid academic, stuffy, or jargon-filled writing. Newspapers around the world are generally written between and 8th and 12th grade reading level. Research has shown that when newspapers are distributed with articles written at higher reading levels, the circulation numbers tend to decline. Editors are aware of this, and will choose articles for publication that are clear and powerfully written without a lot of inside terminology and jargon that might elude much of their readership. If your chosen topic requires terminology that the average reader might not know, include a brief definition-either through context or one that is directly stated-to avoid confusion.

6. Use the inverted pyramid approach. Put the most important details-the "meat" of your article-in the beginning. This usually means to avoid meandering your way to what you are trying to say. As mentioned earlier, the editor will be concerned about space and word count. If the editor needs to cut your op-ed piece to fit and you've used the inverted pyramid approach, slicing off part of the end will not affect the overall intent of your article.

7. Publish locally. This is an often-overlooked method for aspiring writers to get their foot in the door. While national papers are often flooded with op-ed articles and requests for publication, local papers sometimes scramble to find new things to print. Think of it as the 'big fish in a small pond' phenomenon, and one that can work to your advantage as a writer. Later, you can query the larger publications with your previously published work as credentials, giving you a better opportunity to be noticed.

Digital Journalism: How Internet Saved The Indian Press?

By M H Ahssan | INN Live

The Indian media is like pliable dough. It can be kneaded, punched, stretched and rolled in all directions. If overworked, it turns rubbery, dense and inert. And if the hands that knead it are dirty, it becomes impossible to separate the grime from the good. External pressures and internal pollutants jointly compromise the loaf.

“In 1791, American legislators had written, in their historic first amendment, ‘Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.’ Our first amendment said exactly the opposite: nothing in the future shall ‘prevent the State from making any law’ that takes away the freedom of press,” Caravan Executive Editor Vinod Jose in a brilliant, must-read essay mapping the ‘habits of mind’ that have crippled the Indian media.

Rohith Vemula And The Deadly Side Of 'Campus Politics'

By NEWSCOP | INNLIVE

OPEN EDITORIAL External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj recently tried to brush off the outrage around the suicide of student Rohith Vemula by remarking that he "was not a Dalit". This insensitive comment was a deliberate attempt not only to obfuscate the issue but also to besmirch the reputation of the bright scholar, whose promising life came to an end due to the culpability, partially at least, of both the HRD Ministry and the University of Hyderabad. The issue at hand is not whether Rohith was a Dalit or not, but the independence of our academic institutions, which unfortunately are remotely controlled by the government of the day.

INDIA NEWS NETWORK (INN) TURNS '10 YEAR' OLD TODAY

India News Network (INN) today turns 10 year old. We started our editorial operations in July 10, 2003 in Hyderabad, India with a goal to become a leading media brand in India with our dedication, hard work and confidence. And now, we are one of the south-asia's top ten media brands. 

We started this venture as a self-financed news-blog with a small team of journalists. We struggled during our incubation period without any advertising or financial support and survived without any profits or gains for 3 years. When we clicked in search engine ranking, one of our know-investor supported us with a small financial support to make us happy in our efforts. And till date we never see back. Presently, we have 10 investors, 20 professionals, 10 technocrats and 15 top-notched, high profiled journalists in our governing team. 

Apart from our online news and media presence, we do: IT media support, Training and operations, new media venture and upgrade consultancy, news prototypes, offline-media, PR services, digital makeovers and advertising services in India and abroad. We have a strategical presence in India, Singapore, New York, London, Jeddah, Muscat, Dubai, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Srilanka, Sydney cities. We'll soon connect with 10 more cities soon with our 10,000 plus client-base and 15,000 associates across the world.

Presently, we are running successfully: India News Network (www.indiatell.org) consisting of Four Editions: English, Hindi, Urdu & Telugu, apart from our Media Vision Corp., EduSys, India Television, Media Barons & India Vision Inc.

We are a team of experienced journalists, technocrats, professionals, investors with a discerning eye for detail in everything that happens around. The rich experience in the field enables us to dissect things and put them in a perspective for the benefit of our online readers.

In our presentations, we may sound biased in our commentary on the political warlords and their overtures. Therefore, we request our readers to understand our views in a holistic manner.

Oue news  portal is not meant for breaking news. But if we get to know of something first, we would not hesitate to claim credit. In the age of highly charged up and prejudiced political atmosphere and with media organizations pronouncing their avowed stands, we will try our best to present an objective view.

It is with that reason, we desire responsible citizens too to take part in the debates of our portal which provides scope for all schools of thought on a given issue.

You are welcome to express all your views with regard to political issues, some policy initiatives, developments in the numerous spheres of Indian polity and make use of this platform to highlight your thoughts on relevant and related issues. The comment box and the debate box are exclusively meant for you.

Any obscene, objectionable, libelous and slanderous observations will obviously be filtered/moderated by us. Make sure you are just and reasonable. You can be frank, yet polite in your comments.

For now, yet you can interact with us as mentioned hereunder:

• For any queries, you may write to queries@indiatell.org
• To advertise with us, contact advertiing@indiatell.org
• Get business with us, write to business@indiatell.org
• Any editorial queries / support, write to editor@indiatell.org

Jobs For People Like To Read, Write, And Share 'Content'

ADVERTORIAL Content marketing is everywhere right now. Product-based companies are competing to create the best content in their respective industries, and people are sharing more than ever through tweeting, liking, and re-blogging.

If you’re someone who’s totally enthralled by the potential of growing an online presence through content, be sure to check out these job openings that’ll have you reading, writing, and creating a successful content marketing strategy on a daily basis.

Sponsor Journalism On India News Network (INN)

Dear Reader,

India News Network (INN) exclusively covers news on the local sphere on national arena, including civic issues, community and culture, with an independent and inclusive journalism. We believe that you, the citizen are the best person to determine the most important topics and stories that affects you and your neighborhood.

Since we began in July 2005, we have published informative and in-depth stories on a range of topics from water contamination levels to the city's massive road-widening project and more.

But as always there are so many stories out there that we may not be able to cover soon enough due to resource constraints. We provide a way for readers to support the commissioning of reports on specific topics of concern/interest.

Sponsorship (from individuals, groups of individuals or organisations) can support specific reports on topics such as governance, education, infrastructure, heritage or culture. Such funds will help us assign the best journalism talent, and publish multiple in-depth and informative stories on key city topics.

Sponsor's funds will cover research, local travel, writing, editing and publishing costs and we will credit the sponsor of the article in the article or in the series itself.

Our Sponsorship Policy
At INN, readers can expect us to maintain the highest standards of independence in editorial stewardship, whether it comes to selecting stories, or a specific inquiry into an issue. Please note however, that sponsors have no influence on the stories themselves. We assure our readers that at all times, the sponsorship programme will adhere to two simple rules:

- Sponsors will not get any editorial say in the published material.
- Sponsors will always be clearly identified to the readers. 
- We will not accept anonymous sponsorship.

If you are interested in sponsoring an article or two in INN, please get in touch with us (send email to newscop@gmail.com). Please select your sponsorship and send us your thoughts  through email and we'll take care of the rest.

Best Regards, 

Editor In Chief
India News Network

How Do You Publish 'Sponsored Content' For Your Brand?

Sponsored articles are one of the new shiny new objects in the content marketing world. This new advertising channel has opened the doors for brands to become part of everyday conversations with consumers on the platforms they trust most for news, education, and entertainment -- media outlets.

Sitting at the intersection of editorial thought leadership and native advertising, sponsored articles have only recently risen to prominence as a tactic worthy of garnering a share of marketing budgets.

Want ot be 'Broadcast Journalist'?

By M H Ahssan

Broadcast Journalism is the collection, verification and analysis of information about events which affect people, and the publication of that information in a fair, accurate, impartial and balanced way to fulfil the public's right to know in a democratic society. This involves a variety of media including television, radio, the internet and wireless devices. Broadcast Journalists working in television work in a variety of genres including news, current affairs, or documentaries. They may be employed by broadcasting companies, or work on a freelance basis.

The role of a Broadcast Journalist is to turn information into pictures and sound, both reporting and producing live and/or recorded packages as well as researching, preparing and reading bulletins. You will be responsible for generating content from a wide range of subjects. You will be encouraging new contributors and developing their ideas as well as your own. You are likely to be working as part of a team, generating your own stories and bringing on board new ideas.

You will be initiating and producing a wide range of news and current affairs material and will be expected to carry out in-depth research to a broad brief, write material for programme scripts, bulletins etc and at all times exercise excellent editorial judgement and adhere to legal and good practice guidelines.

You may carry out interviews and reporting duties, in both recorded and live situations, in a studio or perhaps on location. You can expect to be involved in originating and developing programme ideas to support forward planning of material and future programmes and provide briefings for reporters, camera crews and other resources staff and contributors.

You will need to operate broadcast equipment: in radio, portable recording equipment, self-operating outside broadcasting vehicles and studio equipment in television, to direct camera crews on pre-recorded and live coverage, to oversee editing and operate gallery equipment.

You may be responsible for programme budgets, ensuring effective use of money and resources, supervise the work of Broadcast Assistants and most certainly, as a Broadcast Journalist you would need to develop and maintain local and perhaps national contacts and fulfil a public relations role.

Qualities: What you need to be able to do the job
You will need to be an experienced journalist with strong editorial judgement and organisational skills, with a first class news awareness and judgement. You must be able to work as part of a team and you will also be able to work with minimal supervision, be brimming with ideas, and a creative self-starter. Excellent verbal and written communication skills are a must, including skills and style when it comes to interviewing.

One of the key qualities is a voice for broadcasting, together with knowledge of radio production techniques and broadcast equipment.
Of course, a passion for radio, current affairs and a real grasp of the subjects that interest audiences are a must.

Key Skills include:
- excellent verbal and written communication;
- ability to work under pressure, to tight deadlines;
- excellent interviewing and listening techniques;
- excellent content editing skills with basic picture and sound editing abilities;
- precise attention to detail and advanced analytical skills;
- excellent organisational abilities, initiative and problem solving skills;
- ability to see the broader picture and focus in on any niche angle the programme requires;
- self management abilities combined with effective team working, and self-discipline skills;
- diplomacy and sensitivity when working with members of the public and colleagues;
- personality, and excellent interpersonal skills at all levels;
- ability to build a rapport with interviewees without losing objectivity;
- current knowledge of the relevant legislation, regulations, and associated procedures, including Libel and Contempt, Copyright, Data Protection, Public Liability, etc., and how to comply with regulatory requirements;
- knowledge of the requirements of the relevant Health and Safety legislation and procedures;

Career path: How you start and where you can go with it.
Broadcast Journalists should have successfully completed a BJTC accredited Undergraduate degree, a Postgraduate Diploma or MA in Broadcast, Bi-Media, Multi-Media, TV or Online Journalism. IT and word processing qualifications are also required.

Broadcast Journalists may begin their careers working as Researchers or Newsroom Assistants, progressing to become On Screen Reporters, Special Correspondents, News Presenters, and Bulletin or Programme Editors. They may also move into Programme Production or Management roles, or become Journalists, Newspaper Reporters or Writers. Some Broadcast Journalists may also start their careers working as Newspaper or other Print Press Journalists.

As a Broadcasting Journalist, jobs are available across a range of functions, requiring different skills, knowledge and experience. Initially, a recognised journalistic qualification or substantial practical experience in journalism (say 3 years plus) is a starting point. A special interest, for example in sport, entertainment, fashion, health, arts etc, with a good all round knowledge of current affairs would also support your career as a Broadcast Journalist.

Insight: Gujarat’s Muslims In A Politically Correct Trap?

By Surjit Bhalla (Guest Writer)

Time for all PM candidates to end hostilities and present voters with choices about policies, programmes and performance.

The debate about Narendra Modi's economic record has just gone international (perhaps even viral!). In an October 27 editorial, the prestigious New York Times stated in an editorial: "His rise to power is deeply troubling to many Indians, especially the country's 138 million Muslims and its many other minorities. His economic record in Gujarat is not entirely admirable, either." Candidate Modi has changed the contours, and style, of the (presidential?) debate in India. 

New York Times Edit And The Unfounded 'Modi' Paranoia

By Dhiraj Nayyar (Guest Writer)

The Editorial Board of the venerable New York Times does not want Narendra Modi to become India’s Prime Minister. The paper is, of course, entitled to its view. One only wishes its argument was more sophisticated, and the evidence more compelling. 

The simplistic argument is this: “India is a country with multiple religions, more than a dozen major languages and numerous ethnic groups and tribes. Mr. Modi cannot hope to lead it effectively if he inspires fear and antipathy among many of its people.” The New York Times has a one-dimensional view of Modi. 

Why BJP is Failing?

By Rajinder Puri

After the BJP lost the general election in 2004 this first person account of interaction with the BJP was published in a magazine now defunct to explain why the BJP lost. It predicted that in its present shape the BJP will never return to power. The article is reproduced without any change.

After six years in office the BJP launched the costliest election campaign in India ’s history and was badly trounced. The Congress, which itself had dwindled into irrelevance, succeeded in becoming the single largest party. The fractured election result did not signify a revival of the Congress. It signified the irrelevance of all existing parties.

The BJP itself lacks ideology, procedure and principle. It has an attitude. It is anti-Muslim and anti-Christian. These prejudices are its driving force. My views are derived from personal interaction with the BJP and its erstwhile avatar, the Jan Sangh. I present, by your leave, a first person account of that interaction, for whatever it is worth.

I was working, in 1970, for The Statesman, and was among the country’s best-paid journalists. My cartoons had been very critical of the Congress and of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In those days of one-party rule all opposition parties stood up for me. Indeed, during those days when Indira was splitting the Congress, opposition party leaders from all the leading parties held a function in Vithalbhai Patel House to air support for me. On behalf of all the leaders present, Atal Behari Vajpayee even garlanded me!

The Jan Sangh (the BJP of those days) decided to start a daily newspaper, Motherland. I was invited to be the editor. Having my own ideas of how to run a newspaper, and believing that in a city largely sympathetic to the Jan Sangh I could effectively challenge Delhi ’s premier newspaper, the Hindustan Times, I accepted the offer. I mire than halved my own salary and set the same salary ceiling for the top five members of the editorial team. I created a salary structure in which junior staff would have salaries equivalent to the highest paying competitors, the Times of India and The Statesman. The Sangh leaders watched me uneasily but said nothing.

The resident editor of the Indian Express, DR Mankekar, had just retired. I approached him to become Editor of News. Mankekar was very much my senior in years. He appeared to respond favorably. On this matter I consulted KR Malkani, editor of the Jan Sangh’s journal, Organiser. The next thing I knew, I was told by Madhav Rao Mule, number two in the RSS that Mankekar would be the managing editor. I was told that Hansraj Gupta had a hand in this decision.

Mule, Malkani and I held a meeting to discuss the issue. The only known managing editor till then had been Devdas Gandhi in HT. Devdas was the boss of the show. So I asked Mule, “What does a managing editor do?”

Mule looked uncomfortable. Malkani replied, “Rajinderji, here we function like a family, we work together.”

I bluntly told him: “I don’t think we can function like a family. If we want to become number one in the city we must function like an army. We must have a chain of command. If there is a difference of opinion, who prevails, Mankekar or I?”

Malkani mumbled, “Mankekar.”

“Have you discussed salary with him? How much will you pay him?”

“The same that he gets.” That was around Rs 3,500 per month. I had sacrificed a Rs 4,000 plus salary to voluntarily set for myself a salary of Rs 2,000 per month! I bid Motherland goodbye. I had a letter of appointment from the Motherland Board unambiguously appointing me as number one. “Don’t worry,” I told Malkani. “I won’t sue you for breach of trust.”

Later, Advani and Kedarnath Sahni approached me together and requested me to return. “I thought I was entering a mandir (temple),” I told them wryly. “But I found myself in a mandi (marketplace)!”

Sahni looked at me mournfully. “Puriji,” he said earnestly. “Believe me, we are not a marketplace!” That was the end of the Motherland chapter. The paper never took off. It was closed during the Emergency. After Emergency was lifted it did not revive. I think the Sangh leaders had learnt the hard way that they were out of their depth when it came to daily journalism.

After my brush with Motherland I had returned to The Statesman. Just before Emergency was imposed, I had stopped drawing cartoons for it because its editor, NJ Nanporia, didn’t publish my cartoons critical of Indira. Those days CR Irani had little say in editorial matters. Nevertheless, after Emergency was imposed, a warrant for my arrest was issued. I went underground. When arrest warrants against all journalists were withdrawn upon the advice of Chalapathi Rau, I surfaced to resume my unemployed existence.

After Emergency was lifted, having had close relations with all anti-Indira forces, I found myself in the Janata Party. I was the only non-party general secretary of the party. My appointment had to be approved by all the constituents of the original Janata Party, which did not include Jagjivan Ram at that stage. I was entrusted with looking after the campaign publicity.

After the Janata Party won the election despite initial private pessimism among most of its leaders, especially George Fernandes, aspirants from all factions got together and conspired to throw me out from my post. Explaining to reporters my removal from the post, Advani and Surendra Mohan, who, along with me, were original general secretaries, said that my appointment had been “temporary”. That was not true. The conspiracy had been so complete that I learnt of my removal only from the newspapers the next day! But that is another story.

I grew closer to Charan Singh and Raj Narain because of my previous personal rapport with Ram Manohar Lohia. I wrote columns for Blitz Weekly and the Illustrated Weekly of India. In Blitz I broke the story of the RSS having given a sworn affidavit to the authorities stating it was a political organization in order to evade a tax of Rs 1 crore. That laid the foundation of the dual membership controversy that provided the excuse for the party to split. Eventually, Raj Narain was unconstitutionally expelled from the national executive for what he allegedly said about Morarji Desai in Shimla. Years later, Shanta Kumar of Himachal Pradesh admitted in a book he wrote that he had falsely implicated Raj Narain at the behest of Nanaji Deshmukh. Anyway, Raj Narain and I formulated the strategy to topple the Desai government, which I had concluded was incorrigible. A fortnight before the Janata government fell, I wrote in my Blitz column precisely how and when it would fall.

In the 1979-80 election I contested against Vajpayee and CM Stephen from the New Delhi constituency. I was then, along with Madhu Limaye and Narendra Singh, general secretary of the Lok Dal. It was a foolhardy enterprise. Charan Singh had announced his intention to apply the Mandal formula in government service. All the central secretariat employees who were voters in my constituency were at my throat. Delhi ’s urban voters passionately hated the Chaudhry. Being general secretary of the party and residing in New Delhi, I thought it a matter of honor that I contest from my own turf instead of contesting from Meerut where, with the Chaudhry’s blessings, I might have easily won. Raj Narain allowed me to keep for use in my own election the Rs 50,000 that I had collected for the party. I didn’t receive a single extra rupee from the party. During most of the campaign I had to seek small donations from friends.

I won few votes but they were crucial. In the extremely close contest my votes cut into the Congress tally to allow a victory for Vajpayee. After its defeat, the Janata Party split again into Janata Party and Bharatiya Janata Party. Meanwhile, because Charan Singh and Raj Narain also parted company, I quit the Lok Dal, not joining any faction. It was then that Vajpayee and Advani personally approached me to join the BJP. Advani said: “Let us forget the past. Let there be no reservations on either side.” Okay, I said, and joined the BJP. I asked for no post or status but joined as an ordinary member. It was a foolish decision. As John F Kennedy once said: “If someone deceives you once, it is his fault. If he deceives you twice, it is your fault.” The BJP leaders had already deceived me twice.

In the BJP I quickly became Vajpayee’s presidential speechwriter and unofficial think-tank. At the same time I got together likeminded Delhi leaders, Arif Baig, Mewa Ram Arya and others, to start the Jan Ekta Manch to work among jhuggi settlements where the BJP was particularly weak. We made quick progress. By that time Indira had launched the bank loans scheme for the poor. The party decided to stop the scheme’s misuse in enabling only Congress sympathizers to get bank loans. The Jan Ekta Manch had become strong enough to overshadow the party in organizing demonstrations and getting hundreds, sometimes thousands, to court arrest. Vajpayee was delighted. The Delhi leaders were uneasy although the Jan Ekta Manch was located in the premises of the party office and no non-BJP member was made an office-bearer of the Manch.

While Delhi leaders became uneasy at one level, the national leaders became uneasy at another. To give substance to the BJP’s empty slogan of ushering in Gandhian Socialism, I tried giving it content by creating the Workers’ Sector concept. Inspired by Gandhi’s concept of trusteeship I prepared an approach paper outlining the Workers’ Sector concept in which workers would become owners, share in the profits and participate in the management of those companies where public financial institutions held a majority share. The body to propagate this concept was named Ekatrit Kamgar Tabdili Andolan, Ekta. I lobbied hard and created the Ekta committee with Vajpayee, Chandra Shekhar, George Fernandes, Karpoori Thakur, Madhu Dandavate, Devraj Urs, Advani and Bhai Mahavir as members while I was convener. For the formal approval of the approach paper and its release to the Press, I got all the leaders to Vajpayee’s house. The next day the Indian Express carried a banner headline with a photograph of all the leaders flanking Vajpayee. This created shock waves among the BJP leaders, minus Vajpayee.

It seemed that opposition unity was being recreated in a new guise. Advani quickly swung into action and derailed the specific significance of the move by summoning the same leaders for routine consideration of electoral reforms and other humdrum subjects. The Workers’ Sector concept died a quiet death.

After Indira’s assassination, when the nation stood on the threshold of a general election, I had realized that I didn’t fit in with the BJP. I told Vajpayee he was losing his own election because the RSS was backing Scindia in Gwalior and the Congress in the rest of the country. I wrote my resignation letter and requested him to release it only after the poll. Vajpayee read the letter and threw it aside. He said emotionally, “Rajinderji, if we quit we’ll quit together! Just wait till after the poll. Things will change!” He stuck out his hand for me to shake. We shook hands and my resignation was spiked. This is the unedited text of the letter I had written then:

December 10, 1984
Dear Atal Ji,

After our meeting last evening I have had an opportunity to reflect on my position and role in the party. I realize how busy you must be at this time while electioneering is in full swing. Therefore I shall start with the operative part of the letter which you may read now, followed by an explanation which you may read at leisure.

I hereby resign from the National Executive, the Delhi Pradesh Executive, and the primary membership of the Bharatiya Janata Party effective from today. However, I would not like my resignation to be made public till the election is over on December 27th, and shall be grateful if the party does likewise, in order that nothing is said or done which may aid the Congress (I) in the poll.

There are several reasons which had led me to resign. First, I disagree with the strategy of the party. Secondly, I deplore the party’s style of functioning. Thirdly, I question the basic integrity of some leaders of the party who put personal advantage above the party’s interest, and have come to acquire collectively the character and outlook of a caucus. And lastly, there is the personal factor which emerged in our conversation yesterday.

First, the strategy. For more than two years the debate has continued whether the party should go it alone, merge with other parties to create a national alternative, or seek cooperation through seat adjustments with other parties. My own views on this fundamental question have been clear and consistent throughout this period, and were expressed vigorously and repeatedly during discussions in the National Executive. I had always maintained that seat adjustments for any ambitious and growing party could never be made into a declared policy unless the party intended to merge with its partners ultimately. Therefore, as far as I was concerned, the third option never existed, and if persisted with, was sure to cause confusion and demoralization with the party ranks and stunt its organizational growth. The continued effort for seat adjustments was a pathetic half-measure which betrayed the party’s lack of confidence and commitment.

The final straw fell in the most recent meeting of the National Executive on November 14th, after Mrs. Gandhi’s death, and after the elections had been announced. You may recall that I again argued strongly that the death of Mrs. Gandhi had brought about a fundamental change in the situation, which made the earlier resolution in favor of seat adjustments outlined in the Pune session irrelevant. I advocated that after the party’s frustrating experience during the past two years, it was time now for the party to go it alone. I urged that the party should put up 400 candidates, come to terms with Telugu Desam and DMK, and boldly put forward its claim of being able to form the next government. To achieve this, I advocated a crash effort of roping in strong independents and assimilating entire groups where feasible. My rationale was simple. During Mrs. Gandhi’s time the party’s requirement was mainly to consolidate a negative Congress (I) vote through seat adjustments with other parties. But after Mrs. Gandhi’s death the overwhelming feeling in the country was one of vacuum with no credible Congress (I) leader at the helm. I pointed out that above all the people sought a credible Prime Minister, and every single opinion poll in the country during the past year had put your name as a desired Prime Minister second only to Mrs. Gandhi’s, much above every other name, including that of Rajiv Gandhi. That was our main asset.

The other asset was that the BJP enjoyed the reputation of a disciplined party unlikely to break up after the poll. Therefore we required at least 400 candidates to be able to put up the claim with some conviction that we would be in a position to make you Prime Minister. The voters are going to vote for a prospective government, not for pious platitudes, which are all that a party putting up 225 candidates can offer. Our chance lay in creating a wave, and we failed to seize a historic opportunity due to the total lack of confidence in the leadership, I ended my remarks in the National Executive with the words: “If we persist with the futile bid for seat adjustments even at this hour, we will invite political suicide.”

A vast majority of those who spoke in the National Executive agreed with my views. Despite that the contrary policy was adopted because it seemed that those who mattered had already made up their minds. What happens now in the elections is irrelevant. The entire atmosphere in the crucial fortnight preceding the nominations was muddied by the arid attempt for seat adjustments, which totally blurred the BJP’s identity and the image of its leader. Ultimately, we are contesting 225 seats, more than 30 short of a simple majority, still confused in most constituencies about whether we have adjusted with other parties or not. With what conviction can we ask the voter to vote out the government when we cannot even provide him with an alternative government? We will not be in a position to do that because in the last analysis we were neither large-hearted enough to assimilate other parties, nor bold-hearted enough to go it alone. Victims of half-measures and confusion, we fell between two stools. Which brings me to our style of functioning.

The party’s style of functioning suggests a caucus, not a collective democratic leadership. The two fundamental principles of a healthy organization are lacking: we neither believe in clear demarcation of responsibility, nor in accountability of performance. As a result, there is no meritocracy prevalent in the party, sapping initiative among the workers. I had repeatedly demanded in the meetings of then National Executive in Jaipur, Patna and elsewhere that we must have clear demarcation of responsibility among the office-bearers, as well as accountability, instead of behaving like a joint family in which some are favored regardless of performance and others are treated like poor relatives. We have fifteen office-bearers of the party’s central secretariat. it is a mystery what each of them is supposed to look after. One office-bearer alone was supposed to look after Punjab, Himachal, Jammu, and Delhi, collect funds for the party, as well as look after the secretariat of the National Democratic Alliance while it lasted. How could one person discharge all these duties effectively? How often could this office-bearer visit the areas under his care during the past one year? I prepared a note suggesting how the central secretariat could be streamlines to function effectively. I put the note up twice, to you and the General Secretary of the party, Mr. LK Advani, for circulation among members of the National Executive. It was never circulated. It seemed that the National Executive was a mere showpiece, with little relevance to real policy-making, which was decided elsewhere. Let me further illustrate this point.

In the Bhubaneswar session of the National Executive it was resolved that the party would favor a Workers’ Sector of industry in which workers would obtain participation in ownership, profits and management of industry. This became a resolution of the party. It was also resolved that the party would set up an Ekta Labor Cell which would cater to the needs of the weaker sections and unorganized labor on behalf of the party. You thought it fit to appoint me all-India convener of the Ekta Labor Cell.

However, in practice both resolutions were ignored. After the Bombay Textile workers’ strike when the Government took over certain sick mills, we did not press for handing over the mills to the control of the workers themselves in light of the party’s declared policy resolution. Instead we supported the Government’s decision to hand over the mills to the public sector Textile Corporation of India that was already mismanaging a hundred textile mills running at a loss. The Ekta Labor Cell was also not allowed to operate because the Delhi Pradesh leadership sabotaged the plan and the central leadership acquiesced. Of what value, then, are decisions taken by the National Executive of the party?

Which brings me to the third point. This regards the lack of integrity of the BJP leadership. When individuals are appointed to an office they are expected to discharge their duties for the benefit of the entire organization, not concern themselves with personal advantage alone. But in the BJP it so happens that the organization continues to suffer while individual office bearers responsible for poor performance continue to thrive. For instance, the very individuals who sabotaged the Ekta Labor Cell were the ones who did not hesitate to seek the help of the Jan Ekta Manch, a similar organization privately set up by me and like minded colleagues of the BJP with our own resources, for work in their own individual constituencies. If such an organization could do useful work in one constituency, why could it not do useful work everywhere in the country for the whole party?

Most surprisingly, those leaders who took a hard line against seat adjustments in the Delhi Metropolitan poll, promptly somersaulted and sacrificed two parliamentary seats in Delhi in order to better their own chances in the parliamentary seats they were contesting. Now the East Delhi District workers of the party are in a quandary, thoroughly demoralized. If the leaders of the party betray such a selfish attitude, how can workers have any morale? Is this the kind of leadership which can hope to create a national alternative that will usher in a new society in India/ Our assertions ring hollow when matched against our actions.

Finally, there is the personal factor which emerged during our conversation yesterday. You will now deny, I trust, that I never shirked any responsibility given to me during the past four years when I worked for the party. I never approached you for any office. I never approached you for a parliamentary ticket. You broached the subject of a parliamentary ticket with me yourself. I indicated the possible choices. Eventually you could not give me a ticket. I neither complained, nor referred to the subject with anyone in the party. You yourself obviously felt embarrassed yesterday during the meeting which you had sought, and urged me to work harder during the campaign. I do not know how you got the impression that I was not doing what I was asked to do to the best of my ability. When the subject of ticket distribution arose, I did remark that surrendering two seats in Delhi appeared irrational and against the party interest. It was at this stage that you remarked, as you had earlier done in different contexts, that some people in the party had “reservations” about me and therefore I could not be given a ticket. How could those reservations be dispelled, I asked. You advised that time alone could improve matters.

I regret to say that I find this position unacceptable. Honestly, I do not mind not being given a ticket, which I never asked for in the first place. But I cannot countenance being refused a ticket for the reasons that you stated, particularly since you did not seem to question that my merit as a candidate in certain constituencies was not in doubt. I have committed no indiscipline in the party, and helped the party in every way to the best of my ability. I cannot help it if certain people have “reservations” about me and you are compelled to act by their advice. When you, and other senior colleagues in the party ask me to help in party work, which is not infrequent you will admit, are you not then inhibited by “reservations”?

When I was invited to join the party by Mr. LK Advani four years ago, he expressed the hope that there would be no reservations on either side. Let him reflect on my performance during the past four years and judge whether there were any reservations on my side. Let him also indicate whether I ever set any preconditions for joining the party or working for it, or whether I made a single personal demand for office or position in the party. I did advocate the creation of a labor cell in the party catering to unorganized labor, but I never sought to be its convener. That decision was yours. Despite this I continue to hear from time to time that certain people have “reservations” about me. This is a matter about which I can do nothing. It is obvious that a section of the party (which has never been named till now, and which has obviously no connections with the RSS lest there be any misunderstanding, because I have never had problems with either RSS or BMS, rather cooperation and encouragement) finds itself incompatible with me.

Personally I have no rancor against any individual in the party and hope to continue enjoying the best of relations with all members of the party. However, you will appreciate that I am left with no choice but to resign from the party, in the light of growing dissatisfaction with the party’s functioning, as well as of the “reservations’ about me that are entertained by unnamed colleagues in the party.

With best wishes,
Yours sincerely
Rajinder Puri

The election results were as bad as they could be. True, the vote percentage declined by just about 2.5 per cent, but the BJP won only two Lok Sabha seats. As I had warned Vajpayee, Scindia, with solid RSS support, defeated him. Despite the crushing defeat, nothing changed in the party’s functioning.

Advani had described the Anandpur Sahib Resolution of the Akalis as a “charter of national disintegration”. Despite that, Rajiv Gandhi described the BJP as an “anti-national party” because it had not distanced itself sufficiently from Prakash Singh Badal. The national executive of the party resolved to have no talks on Punjab with the PM unless he apologized for that remark. A few days after the resolution, Rajiv invited Advani, then secretary-general of the party, for a discussion on Punjab and Advani met him.

I issued a press statement criticizing Advani for breaking party discipline by ignoring the national executive resolution. Vajpayee wrote to me saying I should not have gone to the press. I said I would not do that as long as Advani did not flout national executive resolutions.

A short while later Advani flouted another national executive resolution. Ram Jethmalani had argued all day persuading the party to have no truck with the Shiv Sena in Mumbai. But almost immediately after that the Mumbai unit of the BJP, blessed by Advani, teamed up with the Shiv Sena to contest the Mayor’s election.

I again went to the press and criticized the party for flouting discipline. Thereupon, Vajpayee wrote a letter asking me to resign from the national executive for breaching discipline. I replied by resigning from the primary membership of the party. Ironically, later Jethmalani had no compunction in seeking Shiv Sena support for becoming an MP! Vajpayee’s letter and my reply are reproduced without editing. The correspondence is self-explanatory:

Atal Behari Vajpayee
President
Bharatiya Janata Party
May 12, 1985

Dear Shri Puri Ji,

I am sorry to see in this morning’s Statesman a statement of yours criticizing the Bombay BJP.

During the last two months this is the third time you have chosen the forum of the press to voice criticism of the party. On March 31, you wrote to me a letter taking exception to the meeting on Punjab, which I, along with Advani Ji, had with the Prime Minister. You certainly had a right to hold that opinion, but as I pointed out to you immediately thereafter, it was improper on part of a member of the National Executive to release such a letter to the press. You had assured me in your letter dated April 2 that you will in the future “take extra care’ about your utterances.

I am sorry to note that you have failed to act up to your utterances. Two days back you have publicly criticized Shri Advani for his meeting with the Prime Minister, And today there is this statement accusing the Bombay BJP of indiscipline.

Obviously, you are unable to abide by the discipline imposed by membership of the National Executive. I feel constrained, therefore, to ask you to resign from the Executive.
With kind regards,

Yours sincerely,
Atal Behari Vajpayee

I sent my reply to Vajpayee the next day:

May 13, 1995

Dear Shri Vajpayee Ji,

Thank you for your letter of May 12th.

I must say that I was surprised by your request that I resign from the National Executive for my “inability to abide by the discipline imposed by its membership”. You deem me undisciplined for informing the press that the General Secretary of the party, Shri Lal Krishna Advani, and the Bombay unit of the party, were undisciplined for brazenly violating the resolutions of the National Executive. You consider me undisciplined for exposing the indiscipline of others, but have no word of reprimand for those who oppose your own formal policy statements as well as resolutions of the National Executive. Discipline, let me remind you, enjoins a code of conduct on all members of the party, including its President and General Secretary.

If I was impelled to take matters to the press it was due to my repeated failure in obtaining redressal for the acts of indiscipline by the General Secretary pointed out by me to you privately. After my letter of April 2nd, you conceded that the General Secretary was wrong in not briefing the press after his meeting with the Prime Minister in order to allay misunderstanding about the party’s attitude on the Punjab issue. In my letter of April 2nd I had urged you to ensure that the party secretariat does not bungle in future and thereby project a false and distorted image of the party’s stand to the public. Orally, you had assured me that such a mistake would not be repeated. Subsequently, you made a formal policy statement in your own name declaring that the BJP would not participate in parleys with either the Government or the Akalis for achieving a solution in Punjab. Yet, twice after that, Shri Advani, in contemptuous disregard of your statement, conferred with the Prime Minister along with other opposition leaders in defiance of your declared policy.

Later, the Bombay unit of the party supported the Shiv Sena candidate for Mayor in total defiance of the central party. Privately you may deplore this fact, but what good is private anguish? The party’s image and credibility are totally tarnished by the wide divergence between its precept and practice, and by your pathetic inability to impose your will.

Upon receiving your letter my instinct was to refuse to resign and demand a full discussion on the matter in the National Executive. But on reflection I have decided otherwise. As per the party constitution all the members of the National Executive are nominated by you. You alone, as President, are elected by the National Council. The National Executive therefore is the reflection of the President’s will. As you know, we do not vote in the National Executive. We decide by consensus. But when even resolutions arrived at after consensus are violated and ignored at will by a handful of senior members of the party, it is clear that it is not even consensus which rules the party. The party is being ruled by a caucus, and you have become its creature. This is not a new development. May I remind you that I had resigned on December 10th 1984, when you had advised me that I was not trusted by the section of the party to which I refer as the caucus? I had of course decided not to make public the resignation in order not to embarrass the party during elections, even though the election results were a foregone conclusion to me. I withdrew the resignation upon receiving your solemn assurance that after the elections the party’s style of functioning would change.

Five months have passed since then, and nothing of the sort has happened. Instead, matters have become worse, with members of the caucus brazenly flouting policy resolutions of the party while you remain a helpless spectator. I can understand a stray violation, but not the kind of arbitrary conduct, involving no accountability, which has become the party’s style of functioning. I enclose my letter of December 10th to refresh your memory. For reasons contained in that letter, and for the added reasons of policy mentioned above, I am left with no choice but to resign from the primary membership of the party.

I resign with regret, and in spite of the warm personal relationship I have with you, Shri Advani, and others in the party. However political association should not be based only on personal relationship but also on fundamental factors like policy and style of functioning. It is my humble submission that you should adopt a similar approach while charting the BJP’s future. Given the political instincts of your most influential colleagues in the party, would it not be better for the BJP to dissolve its identity and merge with the Congress(I)? It would clear much confusion in the country. This is, of course, just a suggestion for your serious consideration.
With kind regards,

Yours sincerely,
Rajinder Puri

Enclosure: Letter of December 10th

It may be seen from the correspondence that the BJP is neither democratic nor disciplined. It seeks blind obedience in the name of discipline. Upon reflection, I am inclined to think the BJP leaders were never really against the goals I had set for the party to achieve. They were deeply disturbed only because I did not, at each step, take permission from some appropriate leader. With their RSS culture, BJP leaders are unused to individual initiative. Individual initiative frightens them. Inevitably, in these circumstances, the question arises: Does the party have a future? I don’t think so ~ unless it changes miraculously. If I am wrong and the party in its present shape and form does have a future, I would then be forced to conclude that India doesn’t.

I sent the correspondence I have reproduced to all members of the national executive. After my resignation party functionaries approached me to rejoin the party. “We will welcome you back with honor,” one of them said. I declined. I continue to have good personal relations with all of them. They are in most cases nice people. It is just that they belong to a different planet.