Saturday, October 17, 2020

Welcome to Broken India, where indignity and injustice for the marginalised is the norm

Broken News

Published Oct 8, 2020

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/10/08/welcome-to-broken-india-where-indignity-and-injustice-for-the-marginalised-is-the-norm

 

Perhaps I should rename this column "Broken India". For that is what we have experienced in these last three weeks.

The Hathras Horror, as it has come to be called, will live with us for a long time. The alleged gangrape by four upper caste Thakur men of a 19-year-old Dalit woman in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras on September 14, has all the elements that expose the sickness in Indian society.

First, the rape itself. It signifies that age-old dictum that when men wage war, it’s the women who are often the collateral. From what we have learned so far, the handful of Dalits in the victim’s village have long feared the dominant Thakurs and have been at the receiving end of threats and violence from them. To show the Dalits their place, rape their women – it is a ritual observed even in the India of 2020 with an average of 10 Dalit women raped every day across the country.

Second, we have witnessed how the criminal justice system continues to fail the most marginalised Indians. The family of the victim was forced to wait for several days, even though she was severely brutalised and close to death, before the police recorded her statement. How often have we heard this story? Not just in UP, this happens all over the country. And no change in law appears to make a whit of a difference. In fact, it appears as if all these laws are unknown to the police, or they selectively and deliberately choose to ignore them when the victim is poor or from a marginalised community.

Third, after the woman died in a Delhi hospital, the UP police transported her back to her village at night, didn’t allow her family to see their daughter one last time, and cremated her in the early hours of the morning without their consent. This surely will be remembered as one of the most horrific and patently illegal acts by a police force tasked to implement law, not break it.

And if all this was not enough, the police – who take their directions from the home minister, who happens to be the chief minister – barricaded the village, rushed hundreds of personnel to create a virtual fortress around this nondescript village, and stopped the media as well as opposition leaders from meeting the family.

When they lifted the siege, the story did not end. Top police officials claimed there was no evidence of rape as the forensic examination had not found any semen in the victim’s body. For the police, who ought to be cognizant of the law, including the changes in it, such a statement was extraordinary. A detailed report in Newslaundry explains the law and also what the family went through trying to get the police to act in accordance with it.

It is hard to believe that the police did not know that the victim's word that she was raped was enough in the eyes of the law. That they should speak of the absence of semen in the forensic report as casting doubt on rape was even more unbelievable. Any kind of penetration, even by an object, is defined as rape after the changes made in the law in 2013, in the wake of the 2012 gangrape of a 23-year-old woman in Delhi. So the absence of semen, that too after the woman has been in a hospital for over a week, has no relevance as Supreme Court advocate Vrinda Grover explains in a useful video on the Wire.

The victim's statements have now been appended in an affidavit filed by the UP police in the Supreme Court, where the matter has come up, as also in the Allahabad High Court, which took suo motu cognisance of the case after reports in the media of the late night cremation.

Apart from the police, the UP government, and the family of the victim, the other player in this story is the media. How did it conduct itself after September 30 and the late night cremation by the police?

Much has been written about the hustling and aggressive tactics of Indian TV journalists, particularly in the Sushant Singh Rajput case.

In Hathras, the determination of the India Today reporter Tanushree Pandey has been acknowledged as important because she succeeded in filming the illegal cremation of the victim's body. Her report is heartbreaking and deeply disturbing. But her persistence paid off as this evidence, apart from other reports, compelled the Allahabad High Court to take notice and demand an explanation from the UP police. Without it, the police might have succeeded in spinning its yarn that the cremation was done at the behest of the family.

Just as the victim's family struggled for days to get the UP police to proceed with the case, the media too was slow to wake up. The first reports appeared almost 10 days after the assault. It was only after her death on September 29, and the next day, when the UP police brought her back to her village late at night from the Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi, that the media became part of the story.

Once again, it is print and digital that have to be relied upon to place this kind of atrocity within context. Reports such as this and this in the Indian Express, for instance, give us a sense of the victim's family, the village, its caste make up and the history of trouble between the family of the men who are accused of raping her and her family.

This tragic quote from the mother in the first story speaks to the stark reality facing millions of Dalit families in this country: "She had to cross the highway just to get to the primary school. Trucks and buses moved at such speed…We pulled her out of school when she was in Class 5. We never let her go alone, we were afraid she might come under a car, or that someone might kidnap her…What we feared has come true. We couldn’t protect her.”

On that fateful day, the young woman had stepped out to help her mother collect fodder.

Much of the electronic media, unfortunately, went into its usual feeding frenzy once the barricades were lifted. As this video by Kavita, who is a reporter with the remarkable rural news portal Khabar Lahariya shows, reporters showed no sensitivity towards a grieving family as they thrust mics repeatedly in the faces of the mother, father and other relatives, trampled all over the house, sat wherever they could, did not even pause to consider that this family needed not just privacy but even just the space to conduct normal activities like cooking for the children.

One can’t only blame the reporters given they are all under immense pressure from their bosses to generate exclusives.

Yet, given that this behaviour has now become almost the norm for television reporters, is it time to retrain journalists on how to behave when approaching people who have suffered loss? Persistence might pay off in getting information, but surely insensitivity towards people who have already been beaten down cannot be justified.

The Hathras Horror is not just a crime against one woman. It is a reminder to us all, including in the media, of how little has changed for women in India. It’s also another reminder of the deep fault line of caste that persists in this country. And above all, it illustrates how the state and its law-enforcing arm, which is supposed to protect people, treat those without voice or political power. This is indeed a broken India.

 

Friday, October 02, 2020

Is it time to redefine what journalism means?

Broken News

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/09/24/is-it-time-to-redefine-what-journalism-means


At a time when we have witnessed mockery of what we prided in calling ourselves – a parliamentary democracy –  when thousands of farmers are protesting the passing of bills that were rammed through the parliament, when the precious few rights that the Indian working class had have been snatched away by new laws, when Covid-19 continues its deadly dance of death and despair, when incessant rains are bringing even big cities to a standstill, not to speak of remoter areas, what is the big story on India's mainstream electronic media? No prizes for guessing that it continues to be Sushant-Rhea-Kangana-Payal-Anurag and now even Deepika. 


Enough has been said and written about this determined effort of India's mainstream electronic media to keep its gaze firmly on a non-story, defying even the most basic norms of what constitutes journalism.

 

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is still hearing arguments in the Sudarshan News case on whether regulation of some kind is needed to rein in electronic media. The outcome will not necessarily solve the problem because the trajectory of the electronic news media in India has gone so far in one direction, based entirely on what sells, that it is difficult to imagine a time when some kind of equilibrium will be restored. 

 

The important question raised by this case, in my view, is whether what appears on channels such as Sudarshan News can even be called journalism. Do such media outlets even pretend to follow any of the ethics, values or principles that one is taught comprise the bedrock of journalism in a democracy? How then can what they broadcast be equated with what appears in media outlets that are still trying to do journalism as it was meant? Should such channels even be considered as journalistic enterprises? Or do we need another term to define them?

 

Also, by pegging our hopes on a ruling about one channel that is at an extreme end of the spectrum, are we missing the larger picture of where journalism stands in India today, and whether it can be set right merely by devising ways to regulate it?

 

I would still argue that a reasonably large section of the print media, the majority of the digital news platforms as well as a handful of TV news channels follow the rules of journalism as we have known them. That the attention-seeking hijinks of the popular TV news channels cannot make us throw up our hands in despair and give up on the project of providing the people of this country fair, objective, coherent, relevant and credible journalism.

 

The real danger to this kind of journalism in India, I would argue, lies not with these TV channels, but primarily with the attitude of this government and its different arms. Just as it has demonstrated its complete disregard for any notion of fairness or established procedure when it comes to the functioning of the parliament, we cannot and should not expect that it will push back in its desire to ensure that the media sings its tune.

 

You only have to witness what has been happening in Kashmir this last year to see how this can, and probably will, happen. Kashmiri journalists have to keep reminding us that journalism is not a crime. Yet, for doing their jobs as journalists, they are being surveilled, harassed, questioned, beaten up and imprisoned in Kashmir.

 

This article by Priya Ramani in Article 14 is a devastating recounting of the way in which the very process of doing their jobs as journalists has been rendered a hazardous occupation in Kashmir. Ramani spoke to a cross-section of journalists in the state, women and men. Journalists told her that they were asked why they didn't do "positive journalism" or when they questioned the actions of the state against journalists, they were told, "Instructions have come from the top”. Bashaarat Masood of the Indian Express said it had become "impossible to report from Kashmir". These are highly qualified, experienced journalists who have worked in the most stressful conditions for years. And this is what they are saying today.

 

Perhaps the most telling quotation is from Qazi Shibli, the founding editor of The Kashmiriyat, a news website. Shibli spent nine months in jail, charged under the Public Safety Act.  He was released in April. He tells Ramani, “They’ve polarised the public of the nation into nationalists and anti-nationals. They've divided us into good journalists who follow their line and bad journalists who don’t.”

 

That just about sums up the state of the media in India today. Those who question, expose, basically just do their jobs and necessarily do not follow "the line" of the government are "bad" journalists, liable to intimidation and even arrest. According to a report by the Rights and Risk Analysis Group released in June, 55 journalists were arrested, booked, summoned, assaulted and threatened during the lockdown that began on March 24. All this for reporting on what was really going on in the country during this pandemic. Of these, 11 were from Uttar Pradesh.

 

The short point is that in the process of defanging every institution that can act as a check on the power of the executive, this government has not spared the media. While the majority of media houses have fallen in line following the slightest nudge, or voluntarily because they are convinced that the current regime is the best thing that could have happened to India, the real price is being paid by individual journalists and the smaller, independent publications and websites that are doing what they are required to do in a democracy. 

 

What happened in the parliament last week is an ominous signal of what more will follow. Even the pretence of following procedures and democratic norms has now been set aside by the government. To hope then that a judgement or some idea of self-regulation will salvage the situation of the Indian media is probably unrealistic.

 

We are witnessing today in Kashmir what the state can do to make the media toe the line without imposing censorship. This is the pattern that will be replicated in the rest of the country, even as exhortations about respecting the freedom of the press will be pronounced from the pulpit.

The crime that had no name

 

Column for Mathrubhumi 

 

(Translated in Malayalam)

 


 

For a long time, it was a crime without a name.  Women suffered in silence. They never spoke of it. And they blamed themselves.

 

Now there is a name. I am referring to sexual harassment. And there is a law that deals with sexual harassment at the work place. Yet, despite this, there is generally a silence that continues to surround this crime.

 

The reason is usually because there is inequality in the power balance.  The harasser is powerful, and the one being harassed is powerless.  As a result, even though there is more open discussion today about sexual harassment, and greater awareness about the steps that can be taken by women subjected to it, the majority of cases are still never reported.

 

The reason is that the power balance has not changed. And by and large, society is unwilling to believe the woman who complains. She's always asked: Why now? Why did you not complain when it happened? Did anything really happen, in that were you sexually assaulted? Perhaps you misread the gestures of your superior, etc. In other words, the tables are always turned when the woman complains and she has to justify her actions rather than questions being asked about the motives and the actions of the harasser.

 

When a person with some power and importance gets named, then this dimension of powerlessness hits you in the face. For example, a few months ago, there were complaints about two of the famous Gundecha brothers from the world of Hindustani classical music. Students learning from them in their academy in Bhopal came out with these complaints.

 

As a result, and also due to the publicity that followed, a committee has been formed to look into these complaints.  That is an important step, even though questions have been raised about the composition of the committee.  Yet, it is a beginning because it respects the need for due process to address the problem. 

 

However, each time the names of individuals who also run institutions or head an institution, comes up, there are larger questions that often remain unaddressed.  This is the point that the well-known Carnatic singer T. M. Krishna raised in relation to the Gundecha brothers.  He emphasised that there had to be a change in the very system that allowed for blind obedience to a teacher, or master, to the point that you were afraid to raise questions about his actions even when they contravene the law.

 

The main challenge, I believe, is how we empower our girls, right from when they are in school, to understand their rights.  This is when we can help them grow up to believe that they do not have to accept sexual abuse or sexual harassment, that they are entitled to speak up and demand justice. But sometimes, as in these academies where young people learn the arts, and in our educational institutions, there is too much emphasis on blind obedience. Those who obey without questioning are considered "good" while those who question are seen as "trouble-makers". This attitude is the exact opposite of what is needed to make young people, and especially girls, feel they have the right to raise objections, ask questions and demand their rights.

 

If the law were properly implemented (and it is not), girls and women would feel more confident to speak up about sexual harassment. Unfortunately, that is not enough unless it is also accompanied by a change in societal attitudes and in the way we bring up our young people.  In the long-term, the only way to deal with such crimes is to work towards building a gender just society. It is difficult, I know, but surely not impossible.