A CM resigns, a journalist is abducted: The ‘war of narratives’ in Manipur

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on February 14, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/02/14/a-cm-resigns-a-journalist-is-abducted-the-war-of-narratives-in-manipur

On February 9, Manipur chief minister N Biren Singh handed in his resignation to the governor of the state. A little over a day later, 20 armed men barged into the home of a senior journalist in Imphal, abducted him, and held him captive.

These developments are possibly not connected. But the journalist was Yambem Laba, a familiar name in Manipur. He currently writes for The Statesman, Kolkata, and is known as a human rights activist. He’s also been an open and trenchant critic of Biren Singh. On the evening of February 10, he was a panelist on a local channel discussing Biren Singh’s resignation. He once again criticised Biren Singh and, in the early hours of February 11, he was abducted from his home. 

Laba was released the next day after he made a public apology to the suspected abductors – the United National Liberation Front, one of the oldest armed militant groups operating in Manipur. The trigger for the abduction apparently was Laba stating on TV that the group had “surrendered” when it signed a peace agreement with the Biren Singh government in November 2023. 

Whatever the truth, although the attention of the media is fixed on who will take Biren Singh’s place now that President’s rule has been declared, Laba’s abduction and subsequent release is a reminder of the precarious conditions under which journalists operate in Manipur, and elsewhere in Northeast India.

While the Northeast is often lumped as one “conflict-ridden” area by what people there refer to as “mainland” media, it is inaccurate and inappropriate to generalise because each of the eight states comprising Northeast India have distinct histories, politics, cultures and causes for current and past tensions. 

Manipur, of course, has been paralysed by the ethnic strife that has stretched over 21 months, killing at least 260 people, displacing an estimated 60,000 people, and leaving behind a mountain of distrust and hate between the warring communities that cannot be wished away easily. There is today a virtually unsurpassable divide between areas where the Kuki-Zo people live in the hills, and the Imphal valley inhabited by the majority community of Meitei. 

Most journalists reporting from Manipur used to be based in Imphal. In the past, they could travel and report on the other parts of the state. Today, it would be impossible for a Meitei journalist based in Imphal to travel freely in Kuki dominated areas to find out what is happening and report on it, and vice versa. 

 

As a result, the information coming from these two separate parts of the state are generated by people living in those areas. Given the distrust between the two sides, neither is willing to believe what the other side reports. 

An Imphal-based journalist pointed out that the only news sent to newspaper offices in Imphal from the Kuki areas comes through official channels, namely the Department of Information and Public Relations. Clearly, this government organisation is not going to issue press releases about the conflict. As a result, he said that “we have lost the idea of a neutral voice”, something that journalism is supposed to be.

Traditional media houses in Manipur, as elsewhere in the region, have been hampered not just by the lack of access to parts of the state, but also the financial reality of operating in a state where the only source of revenue is government advertising. Predictably, the narrative that is played out is one that is approved by the party in power, in this case the BJP. Going against it could mean cutbacks in advertising, or other pressures.

With formal media channels so restricted, most of the information circulating in the state is dependent on social media postings – some true, some partly true, and some blatantly untrue. Siphoning through this flood of information is difficult if not virtually impossible when the obvious avenues for cross-verification are unavailable. Who do you call to check? Every side, including the “authorities”, have their own version. 

   

While Manipuri journalists have been severely restricted in their ability to report, how have journalists from the “mainland” media managed? Local journalists often speak resentfully about “parachute” journalism and how they are used by journalists from the rest of the country to provide logistics, translation and contacts. This resentment is understandable, especially when such journalists fly in, embed themselves with security forces to gain access, and then fly out without gaining any real understanding of the complexity of the troubles that have overtaken the state.  

Most of the information circulating in the state is dependent on social media postings – some true, some partly true, and some blatantly untrue. Siphoning through this flood of information is difficult if not virtually impossible when the obvious avenues for cross-verification are unavailable. Who do you call to check? Every side, including the “authorities”, have their own version. 

It is such reporting, usually by television channels, that has added to what one journalist described as a “trust deficit”. As a result, even when independent journalists make their own way, depend on civil society and other contacts to access both sides, and report in as even-handed a way as they can, they also must overcome this initial suspicion from both sides. It is not always easy. Both sides have what this journalist called “gatekeepers”, who decide how much access to provide a journalist reporting on the conflict. Also, even if independent journalists are technically from the larger Northeastern region, they are still looked upon as “outsiders”.

Against this reality, anyone setting out to document the developments of the last 21 months in Manipur, using media as the “first draft of history”, would have a really difficult time. Although there has been some excellent reporting by a handful of independent journalists, who have persisted and returned to the state despite the difficulties they encounter, these are the exceptions.

Such in-depth reporting has been largely missing from “mainland” print media, again barring a couple of exceptions. Even those newspapers that have correspondents based in Guwahati often do not provide them the space, or the time, to do the kind of layered reporting that is needed to convey the reality of the conflict in Manipur.  

We are all the poorer for this.

Apart from Manipur, even in a state like Assam, where communal tensions simmer and sometimes boil over because of the blatant anti-Muslim rhetoric and politics of the BJP-led state government, some Muslim journalists say that their names, which reveal their religious identity, now hamper access. The people they call sometimes judge their line of questioning as hostile even if they are genuinely trying to get information. 

A brief visit to Meghalaya, a state that is rarely in the news, revealed another challenge that local journalists face. While journalists in Manipur are labelled as Meitei or Kuki-Zo, in Meghalaya the divide is between tribal and non-tribal. Within tribal, it comes down to their ethnicity – Khasi, Garo and Jaintia. It is assumed that as a journalist, you will not report or write against your ethnic group.

In 2018, Patricia Mukhim, editor of Shillong Times, was attacked, with a firebomb thrown at her house in the night because she had criticised a militant Khasi group. Mukhim is a Khasi. Despite this, Mukhim continues to be outspoken. She has campaigned against rat-hole mining, thereby angering powerful local interests in coal mining who demand that the 2014 ban on it by the National Green Tribunal be lifted. She has been trolled and vilified each time she writes anything critical about campaigns against so-called “outsiders” or non-tribals. Once again, her identity is sought to be reduced to her ethnicity, while she argues that she is doing her job as a journalist, calling the powerful to account and rejecting hate politics.  

Whether a state is torn apart as in Manipur, or tensions lurk just under the surface, journalists based in the region have to tread carefully, manoeuvring between state governments that want to push a particular narrative and their detractors, sometimes consisting of armed groups. It is, as a journalist reporting from the region pointed out “a war of narratives” in which journalists are caught.  

We in the so-called “mainland” should be concerned about the state of the media and the difficulties faced by journalists in the Northeast. Because if journalists cannot do what they are trained to do, to seek out information from all sides, verify it, and report as even-handedly as possible, and if on top of it, what we report is measured through the filter of our ethnicity or religious identity, then journalism as we have known it is in deep trouble.  

Bhopal tragedy, Delhi haze, Assam mine deaths: One thread binds them all

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on January 16, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/01/16/bhopal-tragedy-delhi-haze-assam-mine-deaths-one-thread-binds-them-all

A haze hangs over many cities in India, including New Delhi. It contains poisons that can permanently debilitate millions of people; in fact it has already done that.

But it is nothing like the haze, the cloud of poison, that enveloped Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh late night on December 2, 1984. That night thousands died even as they tried to escape the cloud to avoid breathing in the poison. And they fell as they ran, because the poison entered their lungs. Those who survived continue to suffer the consequences of that night.

What links the current state of Indian cities, some of the most polluted in the world, and that night in Bhopal are several factors: negligence, indifference of those with the power to make things right, and the fact that the worst hit are also the poorest.

We have been compelled to remember the Bhopal disaster, when deadly methyl isocyanate (MIC) escaped from the fertiliser plant run by the Indian subsidiary of the US-based multinational company Union Carbide because after 40 years of campaigning and judicial intervention, some of the poisons that remain in the soil of the abandoned site have now been moved out, 337 tonnes to be exact.

The fact that this waste had to be moved out of Bhopal to the outskirts of another city, Indore, tells us a story that has not been reported. That the long-suffering population of Bhopal, that has lived with the consequences of being present when one of the world’s worst industrial accidents took place, would never have permitted a waste treatment plant in the city to deal with these poisons. So accompanied by high drama, the waste was transported to Pithampur outside Indore. Only to be met by stiff resistance from the population living there. And with good reason as explained here.

For the media, the Bhopal story reached a crescendo in the immediate aftermath of the terrible catastrophe but then ebbed and almost disappeared. Thereafter, it raised its head only when the victims of the disaster spoke up, demanding the disbursal of compensation and medical assistance, or to expose the fact that the poisons in the abandoned factory site were polluting the ground water in the areas around, and affecting the health of more people.

The problem with reporting only events, such as the moving out of waste from the Bhopal plant, without informing readers about the context, is that our understanding of what the Bhopal disaster really represented remains limited. At a time of distraction and diminished attention spans, there are generations that have grown up without knowing anything about the Bhopal disaster. 

The Bhopal Gas Tragedy, as it is often called, was not just another accident. It was a story of negligence, exposed by brave local journalists like the late Raj Kumar Keswani, of the indifference of the state government in allowing people to inhabit areas around a plant using hazardous chemicals, and the shameful manner in which the central government reached a settlement with Union Carbide for what was considered even then a pittance: US $470 million. A powerful multinational company escaped criminal liability because it operated through a subsidiary in India. In the country of its origin, the US, it would not have escaped so lightly. 

Meanwhile, the media has dropped the ball on tracking hazardous industries as it did in the years immediately after Bhopal. Then you would see some investigative stories about hazardous industries. These reports exposed how many of these industries were getting away with discharging toxic effluents into local water bodies without being monitored or checked. Journalists asked questions of pollution control boards. They exposed how inspectors were paid off by small and bigger industries to give them a clean chit. Some of this did result in pressure on hazardous industries to conform.

Forty years later, we do not read such stories. Does this mean industrial pollution has disappeared? Are our water bodies, especially in rural areas away from the media spotlight, free of such pollution? If people in these areas ask questions, or protest, do we hear about it?

These questions appear almost rhetorical because the answers are obvious. In small print, inside the city pages of some newspapers, you sometimes read stories about how in industrial estates, surrounded by settlements, there has been an explosion, or a leakage of hazardous chemicals. The locals protest. There is minimal coverage. And then nothing more. Was the company fined? Taken to court? Who inspected the factory? Why was the leak not detected? Who is responsible for the negligence? Was there any accountability? 

Once again, the answers to these questions are obvious. Forty years after Bhopal, we have laws like the Environment Protection Act 1986. We have systems to check hazardous industries like pollution control boards. But essentially, it is business as usual.

Apart from the continued indifference of governments, at the state and central level, what remains true today as it was 40 years ago is that without civic activism and an empathetic media, nothing changes.  

The other incident that ought to set off some introspection in the media is that of the tragic accident in Dima Hasao in Assam where nine miners were stuck inside a flooded “rat-hole” coal mine.

The description of such a mine, a “rat-hole”, illustrates the callous, almost murderous method, of retrieving coal because using machines is too expensive. Men are pushed down these holes with barely space to move and must manually dig out the coal, the black gold that will make some people rich. But in the process, these men, desperate for any kind of work, risk life and limb without much by way of compensation.

In 2014, the National Green Tribunal banned such rat-hole mines. There were no ifs and buts. They were banned. And yet, today we are reading about yet another disaster. As with Bhopal, in the post ban period, were there investigative stories to expose whether the ban was being observed at all? Were state governments doing anything to stop it? 

Does the media always need a disaster, or the intervention of the court, to report on such environmentally dangerous and callous methods of mining? Will our media take its gaze away from politics and politicians for a moment to think about the continuance of rat-hole mining and what this means for the families of the men who drowned in the Dima Hasao rat-hole coal mine? 

This column has asked questions because I believe that is the media’s job, one that it is barely doing today. The absence of such questioning reflects the same indifference for which we blame governments. 

As always, there are honourable exceptions. But glance at your daily newspaper, and if you have the stomach for it, watch news on any television channel, and you would have to ask: Is there nothing else happening in India for the media to report apart from elections, politics and the exhortations of politicians? 

 

The 2024 election didn’t change the media much. But readers can hope for better this year

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on Jan 3, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/01/03/the-2024-election-didnt-change-the-media-much-but-readers-can-hope-for-better-this-year

New Year resolutions are made to be broken, we are told. And hopes and expectations for the New Year are also, probably, destined to lead to disappointment. But there’s no harm in hoping that some things will change, as far as the media is concerned, even if much remains the same in 2025.

Will Indian mainstream media, that has favoured the prostrate pose by and large, sit up even a little in 2025? Is that expecting too much after a decade of being mostly supine? Let me start with one example that holds out a sliver of hope that perhaps something is stirring. 

On New Year’s Eve, Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh “apologised” to the people of Manipur. He said he wanted to say sorry to the people of the state for what had happened since May 3, 2023. “I really feel regret and would like to apologise to all natives,” he said. But he then went on to say, “Whatever happened has happened. We have to forgive and forget the past mistakes and make a new beginning.”

Manipuris on all sides cannot forget leave alone forgive a government that has looked the other way for 20 months as hundreds have been killed and thousands displaced in the ethnic conflict that has paralysed this northeastern state. 

Singh’s apology drew sharp editorials in leading English language newspapers, including Indian Express, The Hindu, Times of India, The Telegraph and Hindustan Times. However, while all said that the apology was “too little and too late”, it was The Hindu that called out the culpability of the central government.   

Referring to the annual home ministry report on the northeastern region, which attributed 77 percent of the increase in violence to Manipur, the paper reminded the government that while acknowledging this is a beginning, it is not enough. 

Furthermore, by declaring in the report that the Northeast was on the path to peace, the home ministry was effectively “burying its head in the sand”. 

Perhaps this is just a nuance, but it is interesting that while all the newspapers criticised Biren Singh, only a few underlined the role of the central government in the on-going strife in the state. 

The centre has not just failed to haul up the state government but has continued to treat the ethnic violence in the state as a law-and-order problem and refused to acknowledge the partisan policies of the state government. 

This hesitation to call out the centre and the prime minister, who has continued his silence even as a state in the union continues to burn, suggests that mainstream print media continues to tread carefully. One had hoped, given the results of the 2024 general elections and the BJP’s reduced numbers in the Lok Sabha, that national newspapers would have felt more confident to be critical of the central government and its policies. That they would have followed up and investigated how the content of the boastful advertisements from the central and state governments that they willingly carry does not reflect the reality on the ground. This has not happened and as of now, looks unlikely that it will.

Therefore, my new year hope that mainstream print media (in English) will develop something of a spine is probably misplaced.

The other hope is that the government will junk the Broadcasting Services Bill, which has now been pushed onto the backburner.

That too might be wishful thinking as the very fact that such a law was formulated in the first place indicated an intent – to curb the few independent spaces that exist online. There is no sign that this intent has changed so far. 

So, one can expect that in one form or the other, the pinpricks by independent digital media will be sought to be checked or squashed by the central government and some state governments.

Will independent journalists, those who dare to speak out or write critically, and the platforms that carry their reports and comments be spared the rod in the form of threats, arrests, income tax raids etc that have been the norm in the last years?

We can always wish and hope for a change of heart in the government but again, as with the broadcasting bill, there is no indication that the intent to hound critics has disappeared. It might be somnolent at this moment. But probably not for very long. 

As for journalists in jail, of the seven who are still in prison, the majority are from Jammu and Kashmir. I am thinking of Asif Sultan, former editor of Kashmir Narrator, who was rearrested after spending five years in jail. There is Sajad Gul of Kashmir Walla who was arrested in 2022 but released on bail in October last year and Majid Hyderi and Irfan Mehraj who are still in jail.

Despite elections having been held in the union territory, here too there is little to indicate that the elected government led by Omar Abdullah of the National Conference will make any difference to the future of these journalists. In fact, one of the few reports in a mainstream newspapers that tells us about the powerlessness of the Abdullah government is this report by Peerzada Ashiq in The Hindu where he writes: “It is becoming more and more evident that Raj Bhavan and the Chief Minister’s Office are not just two power centres but two different ideological forces.” And the power centre that remains dominant is controlled by the Centre. 

Despite all this, we can and should hope for better times. Not because we believe that there will be an unexpected change of heart in the men who run this country. That they will realise the importance of a free, critical and independent media in a democracy. But because despite intimidation and lack of resources, independent media still survives, and courageous journalists still go out and do stories that the government would prefer are never told.

Here are a couple of the many stories that are noteworthy from recent days. Take the time to read them to realise the vast difference between what is dished out to you every day in the newspaper that you read, that is if you read one at all, and the kind of journalism that is needed for democracy to survive in this country.

Omar Rashid, who was once The Hindu’s UP correspondent, has written this fascinating report in The Wire.  He exposes how the UP government is literally spoon-feeding the media on the kind of stories it ought to be doing in the lead up to the Maha Kumbh Mela. This includes suggesting who should be interviewed and the angles that ought to be explored. A letter from the publicity department of the state government to the media spells out no less than 70 story ideas, something even an experienced editor would be hard put to assemble. Having read this, it would be interesting to see what the media does report on Maha Kumbh Mela.

The other noteworthy story is this two-part series by Shreegireesh Jallihal of the Reporters’ Collective. It exposes how the Modi government has gone about “fixing” global indices such as the Global Hunger Index, in which India was ranked an unflattering 102 out of 171 countries. The strategy involves going beyond dismissing them as inaccurate or discrediting them, which the government does each time a global ranking is announced. Instead, it is developing its own ranking based on what it claims is accurate data.  

In the end, rankings are supposed to represent a ground reality that the media must explore. It rarely does. Here is one reality check provided by the digital platform Article 14 where three elderly women workers speak about the struggle to access security schemes announced with so much fanfare by the UP government, and amplified by the media.