India Today is the doyen of news magazines in India that informed and educated a generation of citizens. My political interests evolved and strengthened because of the magazine, which until the mid-1990s was arguably the sole arbiter of public conversation.
In the past decade, however, India Today buffeted by severe competition from Outlook has degenerated to reflect its predominantly urban, middle-class readership’s pro-BJP views. This blog’s author, for one, cannot complain against partisan reporting but to have the nation’s first news magazine be reduced to a pamphlet is a different matter.
Another equally troubling, albeit subtler, problem is the magazine’s pretense that flowery but abstruse writing ignoring the facts of a case can alter reality or public perception. This is evident in the magazine’s recent cover story on L. K. Advani, which may be found here.
Even the reporter S. Prasannarajan’s language — written to impress rather than express — cannot hide the fact that Advani is a tired and irrelevant politician notwithstanding his last-minute, desperate push for power this election. It is unfortunate that Advani was never able to translate his stature within the BJP to develop a consistent and unifying agenda that captured the national imagination as opposed to succumbing to near-term electoral compulsions. As a result, history will remember Advani as just another politician whose body of work was a series of non-issues, in particular the opportunistic use of Hindutva and its divisiveness.
Posted by isarathi 
iSARATHI 