There remains a real and popular demand for serious publications which cannot be substituted by the ‘breaking news’ culture, Vice-President Hamid Ansari said here on Thursday.

He was addressing a gathering at the launch of the revamped Frontline magazine from The Hindu newspaper group here on Thursday.

Ansari said audio-visual media had emerged as a dominant medium for providing the target audience real time news on current affairs, culture and entertainment, but there was still thirst for serious publications on topical issues.

“ Frontline has always been a stimulant to the mind apart from providing good reading on most matters that I care to spend time on,” he said, wishing the magazine “continued success in the service of discerning readers.”

Among those who spoke at the event were N. Ram, former Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu group of publications, Congress General Secretary Digvijaya Singh; historian Romila Thapar; economist Prabhat Patnaik; and author Aijaz Ahmed.

Ram said The Hindu Group would set up a centre for politics and public policy which would carve a “serious niche or intellectual division” within the publishers of the Hindu Group of publications. The centre would be known as the Hindu Centre for Political Study and Discourse.

Later, there was a debate on ‘Whither Sovereignty, Socialism, Secularism and Democracy?” between Digvijaya Singh and Prabhat Patnaik, moderated by Ram.

Patnaik said India was in the midst of a serious crisis as inequalities were growing, a direct fall-out of the introduction of neo-liberal economic policies. He said reduction of poverty had not actually happened and the degree of malnutrition and food deprivation was rising in the modern Indian State, which had reneged from the ‘implicit social contract’ visualised in the Karachi resolution of the Congress in 1931.

He called for revival of the ‘social contract’, as widening inequalities were leading to the creation of a large-scale population that was ‘distressed’.

Congress leader Digvijaya Singh, while admitting that neo-liberal economic policies had increased inequalities, said the country had to go along with the globalisation. “We can’t keep the country away from new ideas and technological challenges,’ he added.

However, Singh said the greatest challenge facing present day India was preservation of secularism. “Any effort to impose religious views has to be fought. Every person must have the right to practice and adopt any religion or faith he or she wants,” he added.

>aditi.n@thehindu.co.in

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