Editor Vikas Pandey played by Shashi Kapoor believes Ajay Singh is responsible for the riots. In reality, it is the chief minister who orchestrates them—planting people to make Vikas believe that Ajay Singh is behind it all.
‘I Have Been Used’: How a 1986 Gulzar Film Predicted Fake News
Shashi Kapoor, Om Puri, Sharmila Tagore, directed by Romesh Sharma and written by Gulzar — saw the weaponisation of journalism four decades before algorithms did the job automatically.
By Nirendra Dev
Long before fake news and algorithms, this film saw how truth could be shaped and weaponised. Forty years on, the diagnosis looks more accurate than ever.
There is a line near the end of New Delhi Times — the 1986 film written by Gulzar — that has stayed with me across four decades of journalism. The protagonist, editor Vikas Pandey, played by Shashi Kapoor, discovers that the two warring politicians whose battle he has been reporting have quietly buried their differences. He has filed the stories, chased the leads, and believed himself a pursuer of truth. And now, standing at the end of that chase, he says simply: “I have been used.”
Every journalist who has practiced the craft long enough will recognise that moment. Not from one story. From many.
The Film Nobody Should Have Been Surprised By
'New Delhi Times' was directed by Romesh Sharma and written by Gulzar. Its surface narrative is simple enough: a political murder, a web of intrigue, and a newspaper editor’s pursuit of the truth. But Vikas Pandey does not know — and this is the film’s entire argument — that he is being drawn into a specific scheme of plots.
The story he thinks is chasing is itself being authored by others.
Critic Touseful Islam, writing in Dhaka-based The Daily Star, captured the film’s internal architecture with precision:
“Vikas Pandey’s journey is not a heroic ascent but a gradual descent into the murky underbelly of statecraft.
Each revelation corrodes his certainty, each lead implicates him further in a system he believed he could outmanoeuvre. Journalism, here, is not a profession; it is a perilous calling that exacts a multifaceted toll.”
The film’s politics operate through detail rather than polemic.
Om Puri plays Ajay Singh, a politician pitted against a shrewd chief minister, who at one point turns on Vikas and demands:
“How much politics do you know?”
It is not a question. It is a diagnosis of the intellectual’s permanent helplessness — the gap between what the journalist believes he understands and what is actually being done around him.
Vikas Pandey believes Ajay Singh is responsible for the riots. In reality, it is the chief minister who orchestrates them—planting people to make Vikas believe Ajay Singh is behind it all.
There is a quieter domestic scene that lands differently for anyone who has lived the profession. The editor comes home around 2 a.m. His wife, played by Sharmila Tagore, is asleep. He wakes her.
She says: “Have some milk".
He says something about wanting to cause trouble —Goonda gardi — and by the time she returns from the kitchen with the glass, he is fast asleep.
It is, almost exactly, what the life looks like from the inside.
I first saw the film when I was just beginning journalism in Nagaland — watching it on Doordarshan in Kohima, in the early 1990s. My brother had already identified my life’s weakness, and he was not kind about it.
“This film is about your ism,” he said — he meant journalism, adding: “See how a politician has made a fool out of him.”
It took me years to accept that he was right.
Journalism gives you a false ego and some fame — most of it hyped and self-generated.
In reality, we are made fools at every turn and every traffic junction on the road. We write the stories we are given to write, frame the questions we are pointed toward, and call it the pursuit of truth.
Years later, my PTI colleague Ranvijay Yadav — a junior — watched the film from my PTI guesthouse cot while I slept. My contribution to his education was to say:
“Enough of bloody journalism — you please continue watching it.”
And then there was Anosh Malekar of The Week, who summed up the profession’s particular grief more precisely than most media critics ever have: “I wrote a cover story on who led the flames in Godhra Train. Even my wife did not read it.”
He lamented this. I was a bachelor then and did not fully understand his pain. But reading had already been declining by 2002.
The Modi Lesson: What Journalists Missed, and Why It Mattered
Note the coincidence of timing. Around 2002 — the year Malekar’s wife did not read the cover story — Narendra Modi began his ascent in Gujarat. Television channels believed, with the confidence of the casually powerful, that they could decide who should be the chief minister of Gujarat.
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| Modi in Lok Sabha : 2014 -- Sonia taking oath as MP |
They were wrong. Not because their coverage was neutral, or because the electorate was not watching. But because a different media was already being built — one they had not yet understood.
Modi used social media. He was among the first Indian political leaders to sense its structural advantage: direct communication, no editorial filter, no dependence on journalists who believed themselves the arbiters of political fate. No pampering, no foreign junkets. He did not need to court the press. He built an audience that did not need the press to reach him.
The Congress leaders laughed at this. By May 16, 2014 — when the mandate came — they understood that the bird had left the nest. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government had, around 2012, brought in an expert from a television channel to handle social media strategy, and the mistakes had followed.
Rahul Gandhi’s press conference at the Press Club of India — every word of it recorded — did its own damage.
What went on social media defined the UPA’s image more lastingly than any editorial or panel discussion. The image of a “spineless, shaky PM” easily overridden by a crown prince became the story, and no amount of print journalism could unseal it.
In Nagaland: The Politician Who Understood the Journalists
In Nagaland, former Chief Minister Vamuzo — a committed Indian nationalist who had himself once served as a Naga underground brigadier — had a particular gift for this. He knew how to befriend journalists without appearing to cultivate them. He would place a hand on a 20-something reporter’s shoulder, and that small gesture — delivered in the presence of senior IAS officers standing nearby — was enough to create the feeling of being seen.
It is a small thing. It is also not a small thing.
During the Gulf War of the 1990s, Vamuzo addressed a National Integration Council meeting convened by Prime Minister Chandrashekhar and said: “The country is united and we all are with the leadership.” That is what opposition and minority-region politicians were once expected to say at moments of national emergency. Whether today’s political leaders from Nagaland have said anything comparable in the context of Operation Sindoor is a question the record will eventually answer.
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| Blogger in Vamuzo's Kohima residence |
Long before fish-fry journalism became the standard critique of a certain Bengal media culture, the Marxist leader Sitaram Yechury made a more honest observation about the press. To a group of us at Delhi’s Ajoy Bhavan, he said:
“You journalists go where there is good dinner and good coffee. We offer only chai and biscuit.”
It was a joke with an edge.
Journalists are not generally motivated by ideology. They are motivated by access, by story, by the metabolism of the news cycle. The politician who provides the best material wins the coverage — not always the one who is right.
New Delhi Times understood this in 1986. Vikas Pandey is not corrupt, not lazy, not ideologically captured. He is simply working within a system that is smarter about itself than he is about it.
What the Film Knew That We Are Still Learning
Not all films, as the saying goes, emerge from their moment only to outgrow it. Fewer still, read decades later, look like dispatches from tomorrow.
New Delhi Times is the second kind.
It was made before fake news had a name, before social media existed, before algorithms decided what counted as truth. It was made when PTI was still the wire service of record and a liquor tragedy in Ghazipur was the kind of routine, necessary news that filled the bulletin.
And yet it already knew: the journalist is not chasing the story. The story is, quite often, chasing the journalist — because someone else has decided what that story should be, and has arranged the facts accordingly.
“I have been used,” says Vikas Pandey.
We still say it. We just say it in different newsrooms, about different politicians, with different platforms carrying the result. The film’s diagnosis has not aged. Only the machinery of manipulation has been updated.
ends
Courtesy - The Raisina Hills
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