Written By Invitation in The Migration Story
Link: https://www.themigrationstory.com/post/labour-indian-media-s-blind-spot
Five years ago, India came to standstill. Not because it wanted to but because it was told that it had to. That this was the only way to check the spread of a deadly virus that was already raging around the world.
The national lockdown announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on March 24, 2020, at 8 pm on television, did little to assuage the growing anxiety about the spread of the Corona virus. Instead, it will be remembered for forcing our poorest, most vulnerable and hard-working citizens to flee our cities and make their weary way back to their homes thousands of kilometres away from their places of work.
The four hours’ notice for a national lockdown led to a panic, especially amongst the urban poor. For them a lockdown meant not safety but the loss of jobs as all work stopped. So, they picked up their belonging and left the city -- by train, truck, bus, or even on foot.
The images representing this exodus from our cities five years ago, of an estimated 10 million people, ought to have woken us up to the reality of informality, of the existence of the virtually invisible men and women who build, and service our cities. But did it?
To what extent has mainstream media been responsible for moving the focus away from this reality once the millions forced to leave their jobs and their homes stopped moving? Do we know how many survived, how many came back, did they find work again, have they recovered from the financial loss they must have incurred?
I would suggest that the main reason mainstream media in India covered the “great exodus” from our cities is because it was a spectacle that could not be ignored. And it was taking place within easy reach of where media houses are located, in the metro cities, in state capitals. It was one of the rare occasions where the poor and working class made it to the front pages of newspapers and on television screens.
If, as in the past, mainstream media houses had continued the tradition of having a “labour” beat, we would have known the answer to these questions.
A part of reporting on labour was news about trade unions. Today, many of them have downsized or virtually disappeared. Even if they exist, media rarely gives space for their views. This has contributed to the invisibility of working-class problems including those that face the informal sector.
Also, covering “labour” included reports on closures of factories, strikes by workers like the textile strike in Mumbai, unsafe work conditions, and the precarity faced by the growing sector of informal and unorganised workers. Today, such stories are rare although the ground reality remains the same.
Looking back at those two years, 2020 post the lockdown, and 2021 when a new, and more virulent strain of the virus hit the country, a study of what grabbed media attention and what was ignored tells us a great deal about the state of the Indian media.
Remember that in the years preceding the pandemic, mainstream media in India had decided that it was better to promote the narrative set by the government rather than question it. Much of mainstream media had already set aside a basic journalistic norm – that even as you report what the government says, your job is to try and independently verify the facts and separate fact from fiction.
Also, six hours before Modi announced the lockdown, he had summoned over 20 prominent media owners and editors. According to this report by Sagar in Caravan magazine, “The prime minister’s website reported that the journalists committed to ‘work on the suggestions of the prime minister to publish inspiring and positive stories’ about COVID-19.”
Once the lockdown was announced, the images of millions of poor people leaving cities in a panic, dragging their meagre belongings, carrying small children, helping the elderly to walk with them certainly did not constitute a “positive” story. But this was a story that even the most pro-government media simply could not ignore. And so, despite themselves, and the suggestion by the prime minister that they focus on “positive stories”, mainstream Indian media did report it.
But once the stream of displaced migrants thinned out, so did the media focus.
In fact, within days of the lockdown, mainstream media and particularly television news became obsessed with a manufactured controversy.
Perhaps one of the most shaming episodes as far India’s mainstream media is concerned is the way it played a role in spreading Islamophobia in the early days of the outbreak of the pandemic by suggesting that the surge in Covid cases was due to a gathering in New Delhi of the Tablighi Jamaat.
As this piece in Article-14 points out, until March 29, the media focused on the exodus of migrant workers from our cities. On that day, there was news of a spike in Covid cases. Within three days, official statements suggested that the spike was linked to the Tablighi Jamaat gathering in New Delhi that included many followers who had travelled to India from other countries.
This was the signal that sent some sections of mainstream media into overdrive with terms like “corona bomb” and “superspreader maulana” being liberally used.
Even if the Islamophobia eventually died down, the seeds of hate and suspicion that already existed were further nourished by this shameful media campaign.
Although the lockdown finally ended in May 2020 after several extensions, the suffering of those who had been forced to flee certainly did not. But their stories were not top of the news anymore as the migrants had disappeared into their villages. And mainstream media concedes some space to rural India only if there is a disaster.
A few newspapers did report on the discrimination migrants faced when they returned to their homes as they were seen as carriers of the virus. But after that, there was little by of follow up reports on how people survived without an income for so many months. Such stories are not dramatic like the exodus or heart-rending like the image of the child pulling at a blanket that covered his dead mother on the railway platform in Muzaffarpur.
Unfortunately for the government, and fortunately for people, some of this information did come out, through reporting by independent news platforms. It is here that we read stories of the events post the initial exodus.
In fact, if there is one lesson to be learnt from the coverage of the pandemic by mainstream media in 2020 and 2021 it is this: that even if they choose to ignore the reality, the real news will find its way thanks to independent media as well as social media.
The more virulent strain of the virus that hit India in 2021 brought with it another set of challenges for the media. For instance, this article in Scroll tells us about the telling gap between official figures of Covid deaths in Gujarat and the reality. The facts became known because some media houses did what journalists are supposed to do: Verify and double check the authenticity of official figures. Local newspapers sent reporters out to crematoria to check how many bodies were being cremated each day. The numbers were very different from the official data.
The gap between fact and fiction was even greater in Uttar Pradesh where the Yogi Adityanath government continued to claim that the situation was under control. Yet here again, reports such as this in Newslaundry exposed the substantial discrepancy between official claims and the reality.
This kind of coverup of actual data, especially in UP, was finally exposed when the gruesome images of shallow graves on the banks of the Ganga emerged as well as stories about overworked crematoria that could not deal with the flood of deaths.
Among them, was Hindi newspaper Dainik Bhaskar which stood out with its front page photos of burning pyres and investigations that put a hole through official claims on death counts. Its coverage drew praise not just from other media organisations but it also won awards.
The tragic stories of poor families who had to abandon their loved ones on the banks of rivers because they could not afford the costs of cremation were a stark testimony to the deadliness of the second surge of Covid, but also of the mismanagement by governments. There was no “positive” spin that could be given to this story.
As for the back story that was not followed up in adequate detail by mainstream media, Supriya Sharma rightly points out in her piece in Scroll: “If the lockdown last year came down as a hammer, this year, it feels like a thousand cuts. Obscured by the dramatic and distressing images of death in the second wave of the pandemic, a slow drip of distress is going unnoticed, not just by the government, but even by other citizens, leaving the urban poor to fend for themselves.”
It is only because India has independent news platforms that we saw some reports on this “slow drip of distress”. Such stories ought to be part of routine journalism, not an exception.
Yet over time, the space for such stories, the time and investment that is needed to investigate and write them, has virtually disappeared. Instead, for mainstream, it is news that sells their “product” that trumps all other criteria. And how poor people survive, or rather do not, is not a selling proposition
It is now five years since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic in India. The questions that arose then are still relevant. Have the conditions under which the millions employed in precarious and uncertain jobs, who formed part of that exodus, improved? If not, why not?
