Government should view journalists as allies, not adversaries. Especially in a pandemic

Broken News  (May 21, 2020)

https://www.newslaundry.com/amp/story/2020%2F05%2F21%2Fgovernment-should-view-journalists-as-allies-not-adversaries-especially-in-a-pandemic?__twitter_impression=true
 

 

Phase four of the national lockdown to contain the spread of Covid-19, announced on May 17, also marks several important developments on the media front.

On May 19, the Supreme Court granted Arnab Goswami of Republic TV, a three-week extension from arrest in cases filed against him for his remarks about Congress president Sonia Gandhi on his television channel. Multiple FIRs had been filed against him in different parts of the country. The court vacated all the cases except the one in Nagpur that was shifted to Mumbai. At the same time, it turned down Goswami's request that the case be referred to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

The significance of this interim order lies in some of the remarks made by the judges. According to the Indian Express, here are some of the court's observations:

“India’s freedoms will rest safe as long as journalists can speak truth to power without being chilled by a threat of reprisal” and “free citizens cannot exist when the news media is chained to adhere to one position.”

“The petitioner is a media journalist. The airing of views on television shows which he hosts is in the exercise of his fundamental right to speech and expression under Article 19(1)(a)”.

“The exercise of that fundamental right is not absolute and is answerable to the legal regime enacted with reference to the provisions of Article 19(2). But to allow a journalist to be subjected to multiple complaints and to the pursuit of remedies traversing multiple states and jurisdictions when faced with successive FIRs and complaints bearing the same foundation has a stifling effect on the exercise of that freedom”.

“This will effectively destroy the freedom of the citizen to know of the affairs of governance in the nation and the right of the journalist to ensure an informed society”.

The court also quoted the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari when he said,  “questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question”.

These observations must be viewed against the reality of what the Indian media faces today in India. While Goswami has been granted relief, there are several journalists still facing serious charges including under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) as in the case of the journalists in Kashmir, under sedition as in the case of the journalist in Gujarat whose apparent crime was to report that the Gujarat Chief Minister might be on his way out, and several others including the founding editor of The Wire Siddharth Vardarajan who faces charges filed by the UP government. Journalists are unable to "speak truth to power" in India because of the way the law is used to attempt to silence those who do.

The International Federation of Journalists, in its recently released report on press freedom in South Asia, documents the assaults, killing and legal cases against scores of journalists across India and argues that this does not augur well for press freedom.

The court also spoke of the "freedom of the citizen to know of the affairs of governance". This is another aspect of press freedom, perhaps less noticed, that has been dented during the current Covid-19 crisis.

If you read newspapers or watch television, you will not necessarily be aware of this.  Every day, we are bombarded with statistics, as well as human interest stories that leave you numb -- of the continuing plight of the lakhs of workers and their families as they struggle to return to their homes, or of the afflicted who struggle to find a hospital bed in some of our better served cities.  There are dozens of such reports that can be cited but here and here are two such stories.

But behind this abundance of data and reports there appears to be a deliberate effort to fudge data, or at least to prevent access to accurate and verified data. Above all else, citizens want transparency from those who govern at a time like this. And yet, that is precisely what is being denied by the cover-up taking place in various forms.

One hint of this was evident recently when a report in the New Indian Express was taken down.  According to Priyanka Pulla writing in The Wire, the report observed the sudden absence of representatives of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) from the daily press briefings held by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare since April 23.  It wondered if this was connected to the bungling of the import of antibody test kits from China by ICMR that were found to be sub-standard and costly.  The reported also mentioned the unexplained disbanding of an expert panel on Covid-19 within days of it being constituted as also experts and scientists being disuaded from speaking to the media. The newspaper gave no explanation for why the article was taken off the website.

Pulla also points out that the absence of scientists from the daily press briefings has meant that no clear answers are being given to specific questions, such as when we expect to hit the peak with Covid-19 infections.  Such a question can only be addressed by a scientist who is conversant with the data and not a bureaucrat.

On the new digital platform, Article 14, Mridula Chari and Nitin Sethi go further when they argue that the decision to ease the lockdown is based on "a flawed data base". The article, a detailed long-read, points out that while state governments have always relied on data by the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP), the Centre had stipulated that only data by ICMR would be used.  As a result, there are several evident discrepancies between different lots of data.

Even if you are not interested in the minutiae, there is more than one reason to suspect that we are not getting the full picture of the spread of Covid-19. For instance, despite the rapid spread of the disease in the dense urban poor settlements in Mumbai, the government continues to insist that there is no community transmission.  Similarly, the percentage of workers returning to their home states who are testing positive is much higher than the percentage of infection in the cities from which they left.  How do we account for this? Did they pick it up enroute, or were they already infected but not detected in the cities where they worked?

Even if one gives the benefit of the doubt to the government that this is not deliberate, it certainly speaks of mismanagement. Because when there is a crisis of this proportion, the response must necessarily be based on accurate data from the ground up, about the number of cases, the number of deaths, and the availability of beds for people at different stages of the disease.  If this is not available, how can people in-charge plan effectively?  And how are citizens to feel confident that the crisis is being managed well?

Compounding the confusion on data was the unexplained decision to suspend the daily press briefings since May 11, that have only just restarted. As a result, journalists were unable to even ask routine questions, even if the answers consist of a substantial amount of obfuscation. This surely comes in the way of "the right of the journalist to ensure an informed society”, as mentioned by the Supreme Court. 

This government, like many others around the world, appears more anxious to prove how effective it has been in dealing with the pandemic rather than acknowledging the challenge it poses. A free and questioning media can be an ally at these times; it should not be seen as an adversary.

The migrant worker is also a woman

Column for Mathrubhumi (translated into Malayalam)

Link:
https://english.mathrubhumi.com/features/specials/even-in-the-covid-19-migrant-narrative-women-don-t-count-1.4777812

The image of the scattered rotis on the railway track near Aurangabad, Maharashtra will come back to haunt us for a long time, even after this Covid-19 crisis ends. In the early hours of May 8, a goods train mowed down sixteen migrant workers, who were walking from Jalna to Bhusaval, a distance of 157 km, to catch a train to their home state of Madhya Pradesh.  They were resting on the train tracks and fell into a deep sleep, one from which they never woke up.

Most of them were young men. In fact, the face of the migrant worker that we have seen on TV screens and in photographs, as thousands of them make their weary way home, is that of a man. Occasionally, you see women and children when entire families leave the city.

But are we missing something here?

In fact, many women are also migrant workers. The poorer amongst them work in brick kilns, as farm labour or on construction sites. The women, who have a basic education, work in the service industry in cities, as sales girls, as beauticians or as waitresses.  There also many young women who are employed in several small-scale industries such as the garment sector, where they live in hostels close to their place of work.

We must also not forget Northeast India, from where thousands of young men, and women, travel a long way to work in our bigger cities. While the workers on daily wages, such as those we see desperately finding a way to return, are the more visible in the current exodus of migrant workers, these young people from the Northeast are equally stressed. They also have no income, no money to pay their rent, and no transport to return home.

Whether women move to the cities accompanying their men, or they move on their own, they face the same struggles. They have to figure out how to survive, often in a hostile environment if they happen to be a racial or religious minority. Young women, in particular, living away from their homes, are vulnerable to sexual violence, as much or even more than what any Indian woman faces if she ventures out into the public space alone.

During these times of Covid-19, the young women from the Northeast, who in any case are harassed because they look different, have been especially targetted. There have been several deplorable incidents of women being spat upon, even assaulted, and called "Corona" because of their looks.  This represents the worst of racial and gender prejudice.

Several economists have pointed out that we are wrong to presume migration is only from villages to big cities.  People also move from smaller villages to the bigger ones, from villages to small towns, and also from the smaller towns to the big cities.

The work of the women who migrate, or the ones who stay back, is in many ways the same. If they move with their husbands, they still have to ensure that there is fuel and water in the temporary shelters where the poorer migrant workers live. Back in their villages, they are burdened with the same tasks as they wait each month for the remittance to arrive.  In either case, even if they find work and add to the family income, it is barely enough for survival. At a time like this, when there is no income, how will these people survive, irrespective of whether they stay back in the city, or eventually make it back to their homes?

This is a story that has yet to unfold, one that will have long-term consequences on the health of the more vulnerable amongst them, namely the women and the children.

The invisible female worker

My column for Mathrubhumi (translated into Malayalam)

They sweep, they swab, they cook, they clean.  Not once in awhile, but every single day.  This would be a fair description of the average woman in India. But amongst them are also those who repeat this daily routine in their own home in someone else's house. India's domestic workers, estimated to be more than 90 million and largely female, are the silent army that ease the lives of millions of women, and men, by relieving them of these thankless daily jobs.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has exposed many fault lines in our society.  One of them is the lack of appreciation for this silent army of women. Even as we know that many middle class households are now being compelled to do these jobs for which they paid others, and they are perhaps realising the thankless nature of such work, we hear little by way of appreciation for domestic workers.

Instead, what one is gathering from middle class and elite neighbourhoods in the big cities, including Mumbai where I live, is that employers are actually refusing to pay the women who have worked in their homes for years even though their absence from work is because of the national lockdown. These privileged families think nothing of depriving a poor household of one of the few sources of a regular income.

That so-called "regular income", of course, is itself a scandal. Most often, it falls well below the minimum wage.  There are families who will not give their domestic help even a weekly off.  If the woman falls ill and cannot come to work, her wage is cut.  Few bother to find out where the woman who slaves in their homes every day lives, whether she has access to water, to sanitation, who else is there in her family, how much do they earn and is it enough to cover their expenses including ill-health.

This lockdown is the equivalent of the majority of India's domestic help going on strike.  (Families who have full-time live-in staff are obviously not affected.) But a strike means that the people striking are in a position to negotiate because they are organised.  In the case of domestic workers, there are very few instances where they have been organised, and even these have not yielded results in favour of the women. The reason is that in a labour surplus market, there are always women ready to work at a lower wage.

There have been efforts since 2008 to draft a policy for domestic workers, one that will ensure that they come under the ambit of existing laws that relate to the rights of workers — such as the Minimum Wages Act, the Trade Union Act, Payment of Wages Act, Workers’ Compensation Act, Maternity Benefits Act, Contract Labour Act and Equal Remuneration Act.  But nothing has happened so far.

One reason for this failure I believe is because the burden of domestic work always falls on the woman. In poor households, women do the major part of such unpaid work, which includes fetching fuel and collecting water.  In better off households, even those with domestic help and some modern appliances that reduce the drudgery, these tasks still fall on the women. As a result, our male-dominated political sphere has never understood the urgency of recognising the value of domestic work.

My hope, perhaps unrealistic, is that when this crisis finally abates, households that have had to do their own cooking and cleaning because there is no help will appreciate the contribution of these women, pay them a fair wage and recognise, above all, that they also deserve paid time off.

Pulitzer reminder to India’s media: Always tell the stories the powerful don’t want told

Broken News

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/05/07/pulitzer-reminder-to-indias-media-always-tell-the-stories-the-powerful-dont-want-told

As long as these stories continue to be told, there’s hope that the media in this country has not dug its own grave.

Once again, Kashmir is in the news. For all the right reasons. And the wrong ones too.

When the Pulitzer Prize winners for 2020 were declared in New York on May 5, the big news for India was the choice of three photojournalists from Jammu and Kashmir, Dar Yasin, Mukhtar Khan and Channi Anand, all working for the Associated Press. They were commended for their photographs taken after India abrogated Kashmir's special status on August 5, 2019.

Apart from the fact that all three are outstanding photographers, the significance of their photographs was that they revealed to us in India, and the world, the blatant untruth in the official narrative. 

We were asked to believe that there was no real opposition to the Indian government's actions. Countering this proved a herculean task for the media given that the government had clamped down hard, shut off the internet and phones, both mobile and terrestrial, and placed the entire region under curfew. Under these circumstances, it was remarkable that information did get out, with Kashmir-based journalists using a variety of strategies to get their stories out.

Photographers were even more challenged, as it was impossible for them to transmit their images without access to broadband. Yet, these three and others succeeded. Those that worked for international news agencies were more fortunate as their organisations were willing to pay for them to either fly down to Delhi to file or upload their pictures. Many of them requested passengers travelling to Delhi to carry their flash drives and memory cards with the images.

The images that succeeded in getting out, such as those for which these three photographers have been honoured, told the other story, one that the Indian government would have preferred remained unrecorded. This is their real significance; they are an unimpeachable record of those days, with each picture literally speaking more than a thousand words.

Anyone who views these images dispassionately cannot but be moved. But in the vitiated politics of today, rather than congratulating the photographers, and celebrating their professionalism and bravery, BJP leaders and their followers used the occasion to engage in the usual whataboutery on Twitter, asking why these photographs and not others, of Indian soldiers and their grieving families for instance, were recognised.

https://twitter.com/sambitswaraj/status/1257610956399656960

The use of the term "India controlled Kashmir" in the captions and a wrongly worded reference in the citation about Kashmir's "independence" being revoked on August 5 sparked another row. The photographers were called "anti-national" for projecting India in a "bad light".  Another suggested that the Booker Prize, which Arundhati Roy won, the Pulitzer and the Magsaysay, won by Ravish Kumar, should all be banned because they were "rigged to support the anti-India narrative”.

https://twitter.com/noconversion/status/1257747768807997441

https://twitter.com/NotAnyKapoor/status/1257950186388598791

And, predictably the volume of the diatribe grew exponentially once Rahul Gandhi decided to congratulate the photographers.

https://twitter.com/shikhar_ji/status/1257653402139611138

It is evident that the professionalism of journalists or photographers simply doing their jobs under difficult circumstances just cannot be appreciated by people averse to any other political perspective barring their own.

Be that as it may, the Pulitzer is a recognition that is well deserved, and certainly a shot in the arm for all journalists working in Jammu and Kashmir under challenging conditions that are not transitory, but virtually permanent. Even as I write this, internet and mobile phone connectivity has again been snapped with the recent uptick in gunfights between security forces and militants.

Those covering the Covid-19 pandemic do not face the kind of daily challenges faced by journalists in Kashmir, but for them too there are hurdles. The story is not an easy one to tell when it consists of numbers and figures on the one hand and tragic personal stories on the other.

By now, the average reader's eyes would be glazing over at the daily headlines of how many more positive cases have been recorded, and how many deaths. These numbers have to be reported – more so after the diktat by the Supreme Court that the media "must" publish the official version.  But this daily dose of statistics can sometimes obscure the real problems on the ground. For instance, the dangers facing frontline workers without adequate safety gear, the quality of the protective gear that India is trying to procure, the attitude of private hospitals in accommodating infected people, the shortages of beds, the unsatisfactory nature of testing, the daily struggles of the urban poor to access healthcare.

It is commendable that some in print and digital media, as well as television, have continued to report such stories and, thereby, exposed the real situation on the ground beyond statistics. A pandemic after all is the story of the lives of people, their fears and anxieties, their ability or inability to access healthcare. Unfortunately, the government still prefers to talk about "positive" and "negative" reports, failing to understand that the media's job is not to project one or the other, but to tell it as it is.

And that is the other uncomfortable reality that the government just cannot turn its face away from because of the media's continuous and determined coverage of the migrant workers story. It has not ended yet, nor will it disappear for some time to come.

We still see hundreds of them setting out on foot with their meagre belongings, men, women, children, determined to traverse hundreds of kilometres. Every story speaks of hopelessness and desperation.

We have also read the stories of hope and heartbreak when the government finally announced, after extending the national lockdown on May 3 by two weeks, that it would arrange trains to take migrants to their home states.

There again, had it not been for the detailed reports in the media that revealed that migrants were not only being charged for the journey, but were also being fleeced by local doctors for the mandatory medical certificate they needed before boarding the trains, the government could have got away with pretending it was doing the migrants a great favour. Only after Congress president Sonia Gandhi offered to pay for the migrants to travel home was there a mad scramble to cover up with more obfuscation about railway subsidies and that 15 percent of the cost was supposed to be borne by state governments. Once again, the record stands in black and white. Thousands of migrants were issued tickets and they paid for them with borrowed funds.

The latest turn in the migrant workers story is even more ghastly: the Karnataka government has decided to stop them from leaving because the local construction industry wants labour to restart projects. It is as if these migrant workers are non-people, slaves who can be put to any task by their masters. That they chose to leave because they had not been paid and did not wish to continue living in pitiable conditions is not acknowledged.

Visit any construction site in the country. You will be horrified at the way workers live, not for a week or two, but for months, even years on end. If after virtually starving for weeks, they pack their bags and leave, should their decision not be respected? How can a government decide otherwise?  Are these not citizens with a free choice about where they work, where they live, and how they live?  How have we come to such a pass that we can actually contemplate treating fellow citizens in this way?

These fault lines in our society, callous governments and an indifferent society that has virtually invisibilised millions of Indian citizens have to be recorded and reported by the media. As long as these stories continue to be told, despite the pressures to under-report or not report at all, there is some hope that the media in this country has not dug its own grave.

Stalked by coronavirus, hounded by the state, losing jobs: Is nobody looking out for Indian journalists?

Broken News

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/04/23/stalked-by-coronavirus-hounded-by-the-state-losing-jobs-is-nobody-looking-out-for-indian-journalists

The post-pandemic media scene is grim, with fewer jobs and shrinking spaces to report without fear.

When journalists and journalism become the news, we need to be concerned.

In the course of the last 72 hours, three journalists in Kashmir have been slapped with cases, two under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act for posts on social media and the other for reporting "factually incorrect" news.

While such cases and intimidation by the police and the security forces are a daily hazard that journalists in Kashmir have had to contend with for decades, as this report in The Caravan documents, the FIR against one of the few women journalists in Kashmir is surely a first.

Masrat Zahra is an exceptionally talented young photojournalist whose work has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She has broken new ground in a state where journalism has been almost exclusively a male domain. Today, apart from Zahra, there are several women journalists who stand out for their courage and for the quality of their work.

Charged under the UAPA for Facebook posts from 2008 and 2018, as reported by Scroll, and identified only as a "Facebook user" and not a journalist, the FIR against her is bizarre in more ways than one. Why she has been singled out, and that too for posts of photographs that have been published, will unravel in the days to come.

What is concerning, however, is the message that this sends out. By slapping cases on two experienced journalists apart from Zahra – Peerzada Ashiq from The Hindu and author and journalist Gowhar Geelani – are the powers-that-be in Kashmir, who take directions directly from New Delhi, reminding Kashmiri journalists that nothing has changed for them, even during this Covid-19 pandemic? That their freedom extends only as far as the rope that is held by the authorities, and that it can be yanked at any time without notice? Given this, journalists in mainland India need to respect, applaud and support their counterparts in Kashmir for continuing to report under these conditions.

The cases against Zahra, Ashiq and Geelani have reminded us of the ugly reality of Kashmir, a land of unfreedoms ruled by people who claim they are committed to democracy. There have been statements of support from the Editors Guild of India, Committee to Protect Journalists, Network of Women in Media, India, and others. Whether these will shift Delhi's determination to keep the media in Kashmir on a tight leash remains to be seen.

Elsewhere, journalists have been in the news for another reason, getting infected by Covid-19 in the line of duty.  When 53 out of 167 TV journalists in Mumbai tested positive for the virus, alarm bells rang in the journalist community. A pandemic cannot be reported working from home, or even from an office. It requires feet on the ground. And this is precisely what these journalists, many of them fairly young, and the cameramen from television channels were doing. But without proper advice on precautionary measures, directions that ought to have come from the seniors in their organisations, and the necessary equipment to stay safe, it was inevitable that some of them would pick up the infection.

What is tragic is the feeling amongst many of them that they lack support from their organisations.  When one of the young journalists tested positive and informed her senior in the office, the message she got back was: “Take care and don’t step out for a few days,” according to this report in The Wire.

Since the Mumbai testing of media professionals, other municipalities and governments, such as Delhi, have also made these provisions. But that is not good enough. Journalists need to know before they step out at such times the risks they face, and be informed of the support that will be available to them.

Indian media organisations generally lack any established protocols when their reporters are sent out in situations that could be hazardous for them, be it war, internal conflict, riots, or pandemics. Journalists are expected to wing it with no assurance that if they are affected physically, or psychologically, their organisations will step in.

An experienced reporter with a magazine wrote recently on social media, "While there is nothing new in the callousness shown by media houses for the well being of their reporters, this time, the consequences are going to be deadly. Despite my initial restlessness at not being allowed to go out to report, I am just so glad that my organisation stopped us from putting our lives at risk. We continue to write stories from our homes without compromising the quality or our health. Because let's face it: our organisations don't provide us with any safety gear, whether it be a war zone or health emergency." She adds, "Every time I have gone into unsafe terrain, it is another reporter or civil society contact who has had my back."

This should not be the case. If there's anything salutary that can emerge from this crisis, as far as the media is concerned, it ought to be the institution of safety protocols for journalists in all media organisations.

Organisations like the BBC, for instance, have safety protocols for journalists in dangerous situations and there is also mandatory training before a person is sent out. In the current crisis, according to a BBC staffer in London (who asked not to be named), "The intranet site has a Coronavirus help site prominently displayed and we have a whole Health and Safety and Risk management team who are involved."  There is also a doctor on call.

While people have been given the option of working from home, many producers have to go to the office because they need to use technical equipment. "The producers, previously not entitled to take taxis into work...have been allowed to use taxis (which the company is paying for) to and from work and they have also secured free parking around the building in central London so that those who want to can drive. This keeps us safe from the crowds on trains and the underground...this is one of the best things they have done."

None of this is rocket science and is the very minimum that media houses can do for their employees who literally risk their lives to step out to record the news as it happens.

In the current economic crisis, given the precarious financial state of most media houses, perhaps asking even for this much is wishful thinking. In my last column, I noted the salary cuts that some journalists were being asked to take and predicted that job losses would follow. This has already begun to happen, with a slew of layoffs even in bigger media houses. The longer the pandemic persists, the more chances of job losses. This is happening not just in India, but also in other countries around the world, including Britain as this report by the BBC points out.

Meanwhile, journalism as we have known it will suffer. If the journalists who are eager and keen to go out and report are not assured that their interests will be looked after, or even that their jobs are secure, why would they take a chance? The problem for most journalists today is that quitting what they have in hand is not an option as there are few alternatives available. Freelancing remains precarious. It is poorly paid, and payments are slow to come if and when they do.

So in a post-Covid future, what do we envisage? On the one hand, the state has tasted the power to make the media fall in line, either through direct intimidation as experienced by Kashmiri journalists for decades, or by putting pressure on owners to fall in line as we have seen in these last years in India.

India has fallen two places in the 2020 World Press Freedom Index, from 140 to 142 out of 180 countries.  Perhaps, this means little to the ordinary reader or viewer. But it will become evident in the content they consume. As far as journalists are concerned, the post-Covid media scene is grim, with fewer jobs and shrinking spaces to report without fear.

The other pandemic of domestic violence

My column in Mathrubhumi (translated in Malayalam)

Even as COVID-19 spreads worldwide with no signs of stopping just yet, there is another pandemic that is riding on its back-- that of domestic violence.

The nation-wide lockdown here in India and in many parts of the world has led to a spurt in incidents of domestic violence, virtually doubling in many places. Even this does not tell the whole story because we know the violence and abuse women experience in their own homes, in spaces that are supposed to be 'safe', are rarely reported.  The official figures represent a very small percentage of the total number. 

Also, we would do well to remember, again, that violence within the home, and by persons known to the survivor constitutes the majority of recorded incidents of violence against women, much more than sexual assault and rape.

So imagine then what a woman who is subject to such abuse, and who even in normal times is afraid to report it because she fears she will be thrown out of her home by her abuser, must be feeling being locked in with that man 24/7 for days on end?

If in normal times these men abuse their wives, think of how much more violent they must be during this time when they have no work, little money and are forced to sit indoors? The easiest targets for their frustration are their wives, the women who must continue to take care of the house, the children, the elders, and even their violent husbands.

In India, according to the National Commission for Women (NCW), the help calls from women abused in their homes has doubled -- from 116 between March 2-8 to 257 between March 23-April 1, after the national lockdown.

India is not unique in this.  Just as the virus has hit most countries, rich and poor, so has the pandemic of domestic violence.  Reports from Britain, France, the United States and many other countries show a sharp increase in such violence against women. 

So what can be done?  In many countries, including India, women are not just afraid to report because they will end up homeless, but also have no faith in the justice system even if they do report. As a result, the majority of women stay silent and just accept such brutal treatment as their fate.

But they need not if governments recognised the seriousness of this problem and stepped in to help.

In France, for instance, where women have campaigned long and hard for measures to deal with domestic violence, the government has offered to pay for hotel rooms for women who want to escape the violence. They have devised a novel way to encourage women to report. As most women can legitimately step out during a lockdown to go to buy groceries or go to a chemist, facilities are now available in these shops where women can report violence.

In India, the one state that seems to have moved firmly on this is Kerala. It is heartening that the Chief Minister has taken a personal interest and issued posters encouraging women to report through the 181 helpline.

However, as in France, there also need to be shelters where women can be safe, from their abusers, and from the virus. A helpline is not enough. They also need counseling and assistance to file cases if needed. This is not asking for too much at this time.  The final toll of this global pandemic will be much greater if we fail to recognise the cost of this parallel pandemic on the lives of millions of women.

Coronavirus is a crisis, and a chance at redemption, for the India media as well

Broken News

https://www.newslaundry.com/amp/story/2020%2F04%2F08%2Fcoronavirus-is-also-a-crisis-for-indian-media-and-a-chance-at-redemption?__twitter_impression=true

It’s in the nation’s interest for the media to remain free and questioning during this pandemic. But can cash-strapped organisations resist the pressure to toe the government’s line.

When we look back on this time of disease and death, there are some images that will remain etched in our consciousness, and our consciences. 

For irrespective of the age, class, caste or creed of persons infected by Covid-19, or killed by it, there is one reality that we as a country have been forced to confront. The reality of the invisible millions, the men and women who literally build and keep our cities running, but who are forgotten when a crisis hits us all.

Even the government does not remember them. How else can one explain the March 24 announcement of a 21-day lockdown giving four hour’s notice with no planning strategy in place for these millions who live on the margins?

Despite the prime minister’s advice to media owners, proffered a day before his dramatic announcement, that they should run “positive stories” at this time of the epidemic, the Indian media did tell the migrant story – vividly through photographs, and poignantly through the heartbreaking stories of thousands of men, women and children setting out to walk hundreds of kilometres to their distant homes because there was no source of sustenance in the cities where they had slaved for years.

These are the images we must continue to remember: of the father carrying his child on his shoulders, while another feeds his newborn baby even as he walks. Pictures of calloused feet, of women and children walking alongside the men, carrying small bags with all their worldly belongings. Or of this heartbreaking report about Ranveer Singh, 38, who collapsed and died even as he was speaking to his family.

This exodus from our cities represents over one third of the population, based on the 2011 census data, as this article in the Indian Express explains. That is, one in every three persons in this country is a migrant, either interstate or intrastate. Also 29 percent of the population of our big cities consists of people in the so-called informal sector living on daily wages, exactly the kind of people who picked up their belongings and fled once the lockdown was announced.

What these facts and images ought to have taught us, as Sanjay Srivastava presciently observed, is that “informality is not a staging post on the way to formality. It is a persistent condition of life with no indications of a dramatic change.”

Srivastava also points out something that we in the media ought to heed: “The odd thing about an epidemic is that though it might be global in nature, it is impossible to understand its impact without paying close attention to the local conditions within which it circulates.”

It is India’s local conditions, this persistent state of informality, in which millions are permanently caught that will determine the ultimate nature of this pandemic, how and where it spreads, and who it strikes down and kills.

Given the nature of news, the migrant story has virtually disappeared from our news pages.  But it is still the biggest story that will need to be followed up. This will not be easy, given the spread. Yet, we need to know how many of them made it, did they carry the infection with them and are district level health facilities able to cope if the infection spreads to rural areas. This story in Scroll gives some idea of the challenge we are yet to face. 

We also need to know how the migrants who were held back at state borders are surviving; if they will march on once the lockdown is lifted; when and if they will return to the cities.

Which brings me to the other crisis that the media is confronting. Such stories require investment in newsgathering. Media houses need resources to send out teams to distant places to investigate this reality. But the economic slowdown has also impacted the finances of the media. With cutbacks in advertising as companies cope with the economic downturn, news media has been hit, especially print, which depends heavily on advertising.

Already, the Indian Express has announced wage cuts and it is more than likely that others will follow. It is possible that multi-edition newspapers might have to close some editions. It is almost certain that journalists will face not just salary cuts, but also job cuts.

While running newspapers, and even digital platforms, with a small, lean staff is feasible given the nature of technology today, it’s not conducive for doing the kind of follow-up stories that are needed to record the full impact of this pandemic on all sections of the country. And if the media does not record it at this time, it will not be known. The people who are invisible, who came into focus for a moment during this crisis, will once again fade into anonymity.

There have been a couple of other worrying developments in the last weeks that concern the media. One is the direct message to media owners to focus on “positive” stories. This is nothing short of telling them not to investigate and report the government’s shortcomings in dealing with this crisis, stories that will be seen by those at the helm as “negative”.  No right-minded editor would accept this given that the job of the media is to dig out the truth.

But as I pointed out in my last column, it is striking how little we read about the failures of the government and how much more we see uncritical reporting of all that is given to us. There are always exceptions, and these media houses and particularly digital news platforms have continued to report incisively. But taken as a whole, the image of the Indian media, as this article in the New York Times notes, is of one that echoes the government’s tune.

What better illustration of this than the manner in which Covid-19 was forgotten and the incipient as well as blatant Islamophobia that is prevalent in this country came out in full view on television channels once a link was established between the spread of the virus and a Tablighi Jamaat event in Delhi.

Even those media houses that did not want to feed this anti-Muslim fervour indirectly fell into it by headlining every case that could be traced back to the Tablighi Jamaat meeting. Few took the trouble to explain, as this article in Scroll clearly does, that the sudden rise in positive cases was also because there was much more focused testing over this period, something that had not been done earlier. In fact, many experts have continued to emphasise that the spread in India is probably much wider than is being reported because not enough people are being tested.

Also, given that Indian Muslims have already felt under siege for months with the threat of the National Register of Citizens hanging over their heads, this drumming up of the anti-Muslim rhetoric by the media has ratcheted up their fears to the point they are suspicious of anyone seeking information during this health crisis, as this report in the Huff Post vividly documents.

When India will emerge from this pandemic is not yet known. What is known is that the most marginalised will suffer the most. As many of those migrants making their weary journey home said, even if they don’t die of the disease, they will die of hunger.

What is also clear is that an economically beleaguered media is even more susceptible to pressure, especially from a government that has used every means possible to make it toe the line in so-called national interest. At times of crisis, it is in fact in the nation’s interest that the media remains free, questioning, and unafraid.

This crisis has exposed much about our society

My column for Mathrubhumi (translated in Malayalam)

Appeared on Sunday March 29, 2020

https://english.mathrubhumi.com/features/social-issues/covid-19-measures-should-also-acknowledge-mumbai-s-poor-1.4673545

 She lies on the pavement, every part of her body covered with a thin sheet. I pass by her every day.  This is Uma, a child of the street, who will turn 18 next month.  At the age of 16 she gave birth to a little girl, who will turn two next month. 

As our world staggers with the reality of a deadly virus that is crossing borders and regions, spare a thought for those like Uma and her child.  She has no walls that can provide her social isolation.  She has no water with which to wash her hands. And she has no confidence to approach a health provider for fear she will be turned away.  And this, in India's richest city, Mumbai.

The crisis the world, and India, face with the steady spread of Covid-19, has exposed much about our societies.  In India, above all it has exposed the callousness of the entitled and the weakness of our public health system.

The fact that the virus came to India because those with the money to travel abroad brought it in has still not sunk in.  Every day you read stories of people who have travelled refusing to accept that they should voluntarily stay at home and not infect others, that they should get tested when required, and that they should accept isolation if tested positive.

Instead, what we witness is many who are simply not following this protocol.  As a result, even though so far we are being told that there is no community spread of the virus, do we really know?  Already in Mumbai, a domestic help tested positive because she works in a house where the owner, who had just returned from the US, tested positive.  Multiply such instances and you get the picture.

And then, the women who work as domestics live in over-crowded urban settlements, where dozens occupy tiny spaces, where water is scarce and sanitation inadequate.  The idea of  "social isolation" in such a place is unimaginable. 

How long before the infection spreads, if it has not already done so?

I ask because even as we concentrate on limiting the spread of infection, and increasing our capacity to test for Covid-19, we also need to address the unchanging reality like the living conditions of the urban poor that make the spread of infection virtually inevitable.

The most vulnerable are those without any shelter, like Uma.  She is part of a family of waste pickers.  Every day, they sort dry waste.  They touch paper, cardboard, plastic and other forms of waste that would have been touched by many hands, including those with the infection.  I haven't heard of any plan to keep these citizens of our cities safe from infection.

Instead, middle class housing societies are talking of ways to shut the poor out, in the belief that they are the ones who carry the infection. Typically, they refuse to accept that it is their class that has contributed to the spread of the infection. Not just accidentally because they happened to be in the countries that had already been stung by Covid-19.  But by refusing to take the necessary precautions, such as social isolation and testing to ensure that no one else gets it.

If there is anything I wish at this time of death and disease it is that those with wealth realise that if we have a system that works for the poor, it will work for everyone.  On the other hand, no privatised health system can prevent the spread of a deadly virus because it will automatically exclude those who are the most vulnerable, people like Uma.