JEDDAH, 5 June 2004 — The people of India gave their 2004 election mandate for just, honest, principled, clean and transparent governance, according to Rajdeep Sardesai, managing editor, NDTV.

“It is an anti-NDA mandate, not a mandate to a particular party. It is for governing in a principled way,” Sardesai told a function organized by the Urdu Academy, Jeddah to celebrate National Education Day in memory of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India’s first minister of education, here Thursday.

Sardesai, a winner of nearly a dozen awards was the guest of honor along with Sagarika Ghose, a senior editor at the Indian Express.

Sardesai said even the media failed to grasp the big story, though he insisted his own employer NDTV was not as wide of the mark as others in predicting the outcome of the elections. It was in any case the death-knell for non-secular, corrupt politics, he said. He said new Prime Minister Manmohan Singh by contrast was a man of “total honesty”.

He admitted that the media was guilty of projecting mediocre people who do not really represent the views of ordinary people.

Thus for instance divisive figures like Praveen Togadia, Bal Thackeray, and Imam Bukhari were given undue importance, but he cautioned it was not possible to blank them out completely. The term “Islamic terrorism”, too, was an example of the media taking a shortcut.

Sagarika Ghose said for the last five years the media faced the challenge of dealing with Hindu extremism. “How to counter it, how to further the voice of secularism. How to bring the pluralist voices in our newspapers,” she said. Sagarika said secular voices were not enough as they tended to highlight the stereotypical violent faces of religion. Credible religious voices were also needed. “That is why Maulana Azad is so relevant. He spoke as a liberal who was also deeply religious, which goes on to convince that liberalism is at its best when it is rooted actually in religion,” Sagarika said.

“That is where, I think, Hindutva has finally been defeated, not by people who were speaking outside religion but those within the religion — reformists, liberation theologian voices to counter religion not by secularism but by religion itself,” she said.