To celebrate its Golden Jubilee (50 years), India Today — undoubtedly the country’s premier print newsmagazine — has gone to town with a 514 page ads-stuffed mega issue (January 12). The celebration was also supplemented with self-attesting ads on its India Today television news channel in which publisher Aroon Purie (aka AP) and his current and former crew traced the growth of IT into the country’s premier newsmagazine, and showered praise on Purie’s leadership. Typically, other media moguls and houses have maintained an envious silence about IT’s landmark milestone. In the petty world of Indian media, other publications don’t exist.

Be that as it may, there’s no denying that over the past half century India Today, launched as a puff magazine for the Congress party’s Emergency regime, and especially at the behest of the infamous Sanjay Gandhi who was thick as thieves with promoter-editor Purie, has come a long way. Immediately after the end of the Emergency and defeat of the Congress in the historic General Election of 1977, Purie, aka AP, quickly changed tack and India Today became a fearless, independent truth-to-power weekly. It also took the cue from Business India and Businessworld of which your correspondent was founding-editor and wholly supported liberalisation and deregulation of private sector industry championed by BI and BW. Unsurprisingly, there was considerable bonhomie between AP and your correspondent.

However after this publication was launched with the laudable mission of liberating and universalising quality education for all, when your genuflecting correspondent reached out to this media mogul for help with newsstand distribution of this then struggling publication, not only did Purie show up two hours late for a fixed-time appointment, he also dictated crippling terms for bundling distribution of EW with his flagship weekly.

Alas, the plain truth is that India Today — indeed all IT enterprises — are by the middle class, for the middle class and of the middle class. The wellbeing or welfare of the remaining 1 billion citizens doesn’t matter a jot to AP, a hard-ball, bean-counter (accountant by qualification) media tycoon. If it did, he would have lent a helping hand to your editors struggling to impact QEFA (quality education for all) as the non-negotiable precondition of national development. Little wonder words of praise for the landmark 50th anniversary have emerged only from in-house.