3,500 km but who’s watching? How Big Media dropped the ball in its coverage of Bharat Jodo Yatra

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on October 13, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/10/13/3500-km-but-whos-watching-how-big-media-dropped-the-ball-in-its-coverage-of-bharat-jodo-yatra

As journalists, we can support or oppose a political party, like or dislike a politician. But that is an individual choice. In our capacity as journalists who report on events, we are compelled to put aside our personal prejudices when we report. At least, that is the ideal and that is what we are trained to do as journalists.

We know, of course, that such an ideal scenario barely survives today. With a nation so deeply divided along political and religious lines, especially in the last eight years since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power at the centre and in several states, we have seen these divisions reflected in media coverage.

An ongoing example of this is the Bharat Jodo Yatra, or what is being called Rahul’s Yatra. Rahul Gandhi has set off with a group of Congress supporters and others not in the party to walk roughly 3,500 km from Kanyakumari to Kashmir. Just the concept of a group of people undertaking such a journey, irrespective of who they are, should pique the media’s interest. Even more so when the central figure is a leading opposition politician, one who has been the focus of much derision from the governing party.

Yet, if you want to know what’s happening with this yatra, you must look hard to find reports. There are reports, but they are skeletal at best, simply stating the route the yatris are taking and quoting either Gandhi after his daily press conference or some other Congress leaders.

You can also watch the yatra on YouTube on the official feed of the Congress party. Unfortunately, this consists of endless footage of people walking with flags. The camera is always focused on Gandhi who leads from the front. There is no commentary. Every now and then, you see him hug children or the elderly or someone who has been in the news, like the mother and sister of murdered journalist Gauri Lankesh.

But that’s it. You don’t get a sense from these reports of the places the yatra has touched, or of the people watching from the sidelines. Who are they? What are they thinking? Is this just a tamasha they feel they cannot miss? Do they even understand the concept of Bharat Jodo? These are some of the obvious questions that come to mind, especially if you are a journalist reporting on such an event.

But in the mainstream media, much of this remains unanswered.

Instead, the media features the usual discussions on whether the yatra will yield political dividends, whether it will work as a public relations exercise to refurbish Gandhi’s image as he has been frequently accused of not being a serious politician, or why the yatra is spending so many days in one state and not in another. While such speculation is unavoidable given the rapidly declining political stature of the Congress party – and the fact that even if Congress spokespersons insist this is not “Rahul’s yatra”, he is the most obvious focus of it – there is one more reason why the reporting must go beyond this.

For instance, when reporters are sent out to cover elections, they report what politicians say and speculate on the hold of one party or another. But going out into the field also gives them an opportunity to get the pulse of the public, to speak to ordinary people, to understand the issues that concern them, and to convey this to readers. Such reporting has been on the decline in recent years as media houses cut back on investing in news gathering. But there is still enough of it to provide a granular feel of the issues that concern people during an election.

Covering an event like the Bharat Jodo Yatra ought to be seen as a similar opportunity. How many photographs can you keep seeing of Gandhi beaming at some young girl or boy who has rushed up to him (carefully curated, of course), or of his bending down to tie his mother’s or some other yatri’s shoelaces? There is surely more to this yatra than that. 

To find such reporting, you must look hard and literally search the net. It is possible, of course, that regional language papers have been giving it more detailed coverage as the yatra traverses these states. And it is more than likely that the Delhi-based “national” media will wake up to it when it hovers closer to the national capital. But so far as mainstream English language newspapers are concerned, the reports with the kind of details one is looking for are so few as to be missed entirely.

As always, the independent digital platforms fill the gap in reporting. For instance, Shoaib Daniyal of Scroll wrote about the people walking with Gandhi. The profiles give you a hint of the variety of individuals who must be part of the exercise. He writes: “One of the biggest benefits of reporting on the big political palooza that is the Congress’s cross-country Bharat Jodo Yatra is seeing the diversity of the people who participate in India’s political system.”

Another report, also in Scroll, has greater depth, perhaps because it is written by a non-journalist. Ramani Atkuri is a public health professional based in Bengaluru. She joined the yatra with a group of friends. She explains, “For me, joining the Yatra was a personal protest against the state of the nation today, and a chance to show solidarity with someone standing up against it, especially the hate and divisiveness. It was also a protest against the shrinking of our freedoms. I guess there comes a time we must each stand up and be counted.”

In Karnataka, Dhanya Rajendran of the News Minute has been tracking the yatra. Her reports provide both the political and the larger atmospherics of the yatra, as in this video. Even though it is essentially an interview with Congress spokesperson Jairam Ramesh, we also hear other voices, both sceptical and supportive.

Occasionally you come across a story that tells you about the places the yatra is passing through. For those not familiar with the southern states, many of these places are just names. Yet each point on the route has a history, sometimes of conflict between religious groups, sometimes between castes. Has there been a negative reaction from the dominant groups here? If so, was there any display of hostility? It would have been interesting to know. But largely, that aspect has remained uncovered by the media.

Yogendra Yadav of Swaraj India is a supporter and participant in the yatra. But he is not a Congress worker. And his perspective remains interesting because it explains, perhaps, why so many from civil society, such as Ramani Atkuri quoted above, have set aside their reservations about the Congress party and decided to join the yatra at various stages. 

Yadav spells out why he believes the yatra should be viewed as more than a political tamasha. Even if one does not agree with all he writes, his opinion is worth more than a glance. An important point he makes, for instance, is that this is an actual padyatra, where participants, including the leading lights, are physically walking every day up to 26 km. This is unusual as the routine “road shows” by politicians consist of them driving to a spot where the media is present, talking to “ordinary” folk for photo ops, and then driving on. Their feet don’t touch the ground for very long.

The Bharat Jodo Yatra still has a lot of ground to cover. And as I said earlier, it is entirely possible that the so-called “national” media will wake up to it when it enters their territory in the north. But till then, we can read and watch some of the better reporting on the Bharat Jodo Yatra so that it also becomes the Bharat Samjho Yatra.

Two families, and the ‘chor gadi’

 

October 12, 2022. A day like any other day in post-monsoon Mumbai. Muggy, cloudy, a brilliant evening sky.

 

But also, a day when hearts, hearths and homes were cruelly broken.

 

Let me backtrack.  I live in a mixed neighbourhood in Mumbai.  It has buildings with government officials, private buildings with a mix of rich and middle-income families, a large enclave exclusively for Parsis, and an even larger, in terms of population, urban poor settlement where a mini-India jostles for a limited space.

 

There are some private gardens, such as those exclusively for the government officials, and a short distance away public gardens for the rest of us.

 

There are also shops, a police chowki, a Hindu temple, a mosque and a Buddhist shrine. The road leading up to our neighbourhood is narrow, but on one side, it has something resembling a pavement.

 

For at least two decades, I have observed a family that consisted only of women and children living on the side of this road opposite the pavement.  They are waste pickers, originally from Tamil Nadu.  I sometimes saw a man, but mostly the women – an older woman and her daughter.  In the course of time, the daughter gave birth to a little girl, and thereafter to two boys.

 

The girl, Uma, grew up before my eyes.  She was toddler, then a little girl with neat plaits who would wind her way up the road to a municipal school. I bumped into her on most mornings when I went for a walk.  She would beam up at me, her eyes luminous. Over time I saw her grow into a statuesque young woman, clearly conscious of her beauty.

 

Then the entire family moved across the road, to a spot in front of the closed gate of the government officers’ colony.  They spread themselves out.  The older woman told me they had the contract to collect the dry waste from the government colony.  They seemed confident that they would not be asked to move.

 

I noticed at one point that the younger woman, Uma’s mother, looked ill.  She seemed to be literally wasting away.  They said that she might have TB but were not sure.  One day, I saw that she was not there anymore.  She had died. Of what, I asked Uma’s grandmother. Not sure, I was told. 

 

So now there was the grandmother, her grand-daughter, and a couple of boys.

 

Then another family arrived on the same spot.  The man had been around.  I had seen him as he collected the dry waste from our building.  But the woman and her daughter were new. They were also from Tamil Nadu.  The daughter’s name was Pooja.

 

The two families were uneasy allies – united in their homelessness and yet competing for contracts from the buildings and colonies in the neighbourhood.  The man managed to hustle Uma’s grandmother out of the contract with the government colony.  She found something else.

 

They fought often, but also shared a basic level of camaraderie.  Pooja was friends with Uma who was considerably older than her.  When her mother was out collecting waste, Pooja hung out with Uma and her brothers.

 

Then one day, I saw Uma with a tiny infant in her arms.  Whose? I asked. Mine, she said, her eyes gleaming.  And then by way of an explanation, the father did not want to marry me.  Uma was 16 years old then (although later she insisted that she was 18).  

 

Another child of the street, Uma’s little girl, is now almost four years old.  They call her Karooramma.  She is cheerful, waves out to the people she knows, keeps herself busy playing with whatever is lying around.  She imitates her mother and great-grandmother by pretending to wash clothes or the dishes.  She sometimes goes off on her own to the tea stall at the top of the road where she’s given a cup of tea, more like a thimbleful, and a biscuit.   

 

Over the years, both families followed a pattern.  During the rains, they would stretch out a tarpaulin over their belongings and sleep under it.  And once the rains were gone, so was the temporary cover and they continued to sleep in the open.

 

On October 10 this year, the municipal corporation descended on this little settlement of two families and demolished their shelter.  It was still raining.

 

For two days, they somehow continued to occupy the spot, which had now been ‘beautified’ with large potted plants.  They kept their belonging behind these pots and slept on carboard spread out on the pavement. The little girl slept under an umbrella.

 

I asked them what they would do now, as living this way was clearly untenable.  Could they not find a room in one of the many urban poor settlements scattered in the area, including the one nearest to us?

 

How is that possible, asked Pooja’s mother.  The rents start at Rs 7000 and more for a small room.  And then there is a deposit.  Of at least Rs 50,000.  Where will we get that?

 

And then on October 12, the municipal van came again – the ‘chor gadi’ as it is called.  And took away most of their belongings – pots, pans, mattresses, almost everything.  To get them back, they would have to go to the ward office and pay a fine, I was told.

 

When the clean-up operation was being conducted by the maintenance department of the municipality, I asked the man in-charge why they had to confiscate their belongings when they had already destroyed their temporary structures? We have had complaints, he told me. In any case, it was evident he was not going to stop.  He had his orders. And he was following them.

 

I want to record this moment because it illustrates the heartlessness of a big city like Mumbai where there is no place for the poor.  These families are poor, but they earn their living by providing an essential service.  Yet, the city can make no place for them.

 

For the people living in the area, the majority would only see them as the dirty poor ‘spoiling’ their neighbourhood. I can bet that even the woman who complained about them has never spoken to them and has no idea what they do for a living.

 

This moment also tells me how the entire system is stacked against the poor. Little Karooramma, for instance, cannot get an Aadhar card because she has no birth certificate.  She was born, literally, on the street.  Hence, even the municipal school will not admit her.  For the State, she is invisible, as is her mother, and her great grandmother. They are not even a statistic. 

 

I sleep tonight with a heavy heart as I think of Karooramma, who smiled at me when I passed her on the pavement, even as the BMC men were confiscating their belongings.  “BMC aya”, she told me solemnly.  “Sab le gaya”.  And then she waved and said her usual “bye”.

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A longer version of this post was published in Scroll.in.  Here's the link:

https://scroll.in/article/1034969/what-the-story-of-two-families-says-about-the-unchanging-reality-of-living-on-the-streets-of-mumbai

 

 

 

 

 

Hate speech by media: Will regulation really work?

 Broken News 

Published in Newslaundry on September 30, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/09/30/hate-speech-by-media-will-regulation-really-work

In the flurry of political developments around the election of the Congress party’s president, perhaps the significance of the Supreme Court’s recent observations on the media and hate speech has been overlooked.

On September 21, while hearing a clutch of 11 writ petitions seeking the court’s intervention to regulate hate speech, Justices KM Joseph and Hrishikesh Roy made some observations that are worth considering and debating.

As reported in the Indian Express, the judges singled out the debates conducted on the electronic media which they held were “the chief medium of hate speech”. This has been pointed out innumerable times, especially this episode of  TV Newsance on this platform, but to hear it said from the podium of the highest court in the country carries with it added gravitas.

Speaking about talk shows in television, Justice Joseph said, as reported in Live Law:

“The role of the anchor is very important. Hate speech either...takes place in the mainstream television or it takes place in the social media. Social media is largely unregulated… As far as mainstream television channel is concerned, we still hold sway, there the role of anchor is very critical because the moment you see somebody going into hate speech, it’s the duty of the anchor to immediately see that he doesn’t allow that person to say anything further.”

Furthermore, although the question of whether and how the media should be regulated on hate speech was the primary focus of the discussion in court, Justice Joseph reiterated the importance of press freedom: “Political parties will come and go. But the nation will endure. The press is a very important institution. Without an independent and totally free press, no nation can go forward. It’s absolutely important that we have true freedom. The government should actually come forward, not to take an adversarial stand but to assist.”

Of course, in a democracy, only a free and independent media can take an “adversarial” stand against governments. But taking such a stand at present in India has serious adverse consequences, as is evident from the intimidation of independent media, or what remains of it, and of journalists who dare to be critical. 

The case is still being heard. But it has already thrown up several important issues relevant not just to the media but to consumers of media. It asks us to consider, even if we agree that a free and independent media is essential for democracy, whether specific laws are needed to check the role played by the media in spreading hate speech. Balancing freedom with government regulation has always been a tricky issue. 

An additional factor was highlighted in this comment by Justice Roy: “Hate drives TRPs, drives profit.” For it is not just the “how” of feeding hate but the “why” of it. Media houses today think of themselves as “profit centres”. Thus, anything that feeds the bottom line is acceptable, including allowing people spewing hate to speak unchecked on television. 

Of course, the fundamental problem in dealing with the spread of hate through media is that there is no legal definition of hate speech. There are laws that exist that can be used but these are not specific. In 2017, the Law Commissionsubmitted a 53-page report specifically on this issue and pointed out, “The apprehension that laying down a definite standard might lead to curtailment of free speech has prevented the judiciary from defining hate speech in India and elsewhere.” It recommended changes in the criminal law. 

To date, no action has been taken on it. 

We must also keep in mind that hate speech is not a new phenomenon. Those of us who covered the communal riots in Mumbai following the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 cannot forget the role that the media, and one particular newspaper, played in ratcheting up communal feelings. Those were the days when print media was still important. 

As Sujata Anandan reminds us in this report, there were several cases filed against Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray for hate speech and also against the editor of the Sena’s mouthpiece Saamna. But as journalist and author of Riots and After in Mumbai: Truth and Reconciliation Meena Menon found, many of these cases were either dismissed or not pursued. 

Amongst the cases against Thackeray was one filed by a former municipal commissioner of Mumbai JB D’Souza and journalist Dilip Thakore. One of the editorials from Saamna, which they quoted to make their case on hate speech, said: “Streams of treason and poison have been flowing through the cities and Mohallas of this country. These Mohallas are inhabited by fanatical Muslims. They are loyal to Pakistan. Riots occur only in those cities and Mohallas with a growing Muslim population. It is clear from this fact that the root cause of riots lies in the Muslim community and its attitude.” 

This case too was dismissed both by the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court. 

Many years later, the ruling in a 1987 case on hate speech against Thackeray was upheld by the Supreme Court. He was debarred from standing for election, which in any case he never did, for a period of six years – later reduced to two. These experiences underline the difficulties of using the law to convict people and, by extension, the media for hate speech.

Justices Joseph and Roy have asked the government to come back with proposals of what can be done to regulate the media on hate speech and suggested that perhaps something along the lines of the Vishaka guidelines, issued by the Supreme Court in 1997 before the law on sexual harassment was enacted in 2013, could be considered. 

This suggestion raises many questions.

As an editorial in Indian Express rightly points out, “At the heart of the problem is the political economy of TV news which thrives on hate speech today more than ever. There is little cost to pay for hate speech, there are few incentives for TV at prime time to be fair and accurate. Indeed, most anchors are paid employees of their channels and they know they can get away with peddling hate because someone in the boardroom has taken a call in its favour.” 

Corporate ownership of media houses has fed this monster of hate speech because it attracts eyeballs. It is further exacerbated by the silence of those in power, who benefit from it. 

At the same time, any kind of regulation will be difficult to enact for numerous reasons, including provisions on freedom of expression in the constitution that the Supreme Court has upheld in the past in other cases and which the Law Commission also bookmarked in its report. 

To quote again from the Indian Express editorial: “And when politics fuels, legitimises that hate, judicial interventions are unlikely to work. A new law on hate speech, as the court has suggested, runs the risk of being challenged – and violated – every second given the ceaseless cycle of news and social media.” And concludes: “Nothing is a stronger deterrent against hate speech than those in power speaking up against it, calling it out every time, without fail.” 

That last sentiment is clearly wishful thinking given the predilections of the current dispensation. Perhaps a better suggestion is to urge consumers of the media to reject and speak out against the channels that spread hate, thereby shaming these sellers of hate that masquerade as “news” channels.

Lakhimpur Kheri: When religious identity of suspects is more important than the crime

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 16, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/09/16/lakhimpur-kheri-when-religious-identity-of-suspects-is-more-important-than-the-crime

The death of two Dalit girls, aged 14 and 17, in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri on September 14 is ghastly enough to invite widespread condemnation. The two girls, who were sisters, were allegedly raped and murdered, and then hanged from a tree. But what is also revolting is the way this crime has been converted into a political football being kicked between the BJP, which governs UP, and those opposed to it. 

Much of the mainstream television news, in a style that has now become the norm, has added fuel to this fire by focusing, not just on the crime, but on the religious identity of most of the accused. 

On September 14, when the first reports appeared of the girls found hanging from a tree near a village in Lakhimpur Kheri, there was little interest. Crimes against Dalits, including women, are such a regular occurrence that we are virtually inured to them. They appear as little snippets in the print media and are rarely considered noteworthy for primetime news. 

In fact, these early stories reported the local police saying there were no other marks on the bodies of these two girls except the strangulation marks on their necks, and that their clothes were intact. 

While the mother of the girls told the media that her daughters were taken away forcibly by three men on motorbikes, and that she could not stop them despite running after them, the police stated the girls had gone with these men willingly. 

Mainstream TV media’s interest in the story piqued as soon as the police announced the names of the six men arrested in this case – Chotu, Junaid, Suhail, Hafizul Rehman, Karimuddin and Arif. Most of the men are Muslim. And predictably, the story played out as “love jihad” on some mainstream Hindi news channels. The aim of such shows is not to focus on crimes against women, but to use such ghastly events to pillory minorities and somehow turn them into a Hindu-Muslim issue even when the police has not spoken of any communal angle to the crime yet.

As for the shouting matches that pass for a discussion on television, we saw much whataboutery as BJP representatives said “what about Rajasthan” in response to the Congress and Samajwadi Party spokespersons talking about the lawlessness that prevails in UP. The main issues – the crime, why it happened, the views of the family, the status of Dalits in the village, the police’s response, and why crimes against women in India are escalating – were barely touched upon. If someone raised the wider context, they were drowned out by the usual screaming match between opposing sides and the anchor lamely wrapping up with “I’ve completely run out of time”.

I’ve said this before and I will say it again: Why, even in the slightly better TV channels, has this ridiculous format continued? It does no justice to any subject under discussion, leave alone one like this that has so many aspects that ought to be considered. It leaves the viewer frustrated and uninformed. And it completely detracts from these serious social issues that reflect the state of our society, by allowing uninformed and insensitive political representatives to use the platform to hold forth and attack each other, regardless of the subject under discussion.

Have we forgotten that only a couple of weeks ago, the latest data from the National Crime Records Bureau revealed that crimes against women in India have increased by 15.3 percent in the last year? The BBC India bureau did some number-crunching of the data from the last six years and came up with a set of charts that reveal a 26.35 percent rise in crimes against women in this period. UP topped the list. 

As for Dalit women, the recorded data (and we should remember many crimes are not reported at all, or the police refuse to take cognisance of them) reveals a 45 percent increase in rapes of Dalit women between 2015 and 2020. This is the context the media needs to address even as it looks at specific crimes like the one in Lakhimpur Kheri. 

In fact, this latest incident triggered memories of 2014 when two minor Dalit girls from Katra Sadatganj in UP’s Badaun district were found hanging from a mango tree. They had gone out in the evening to “relieve” themselves – a most inappropriate term that conceals the shocking lack of sanitation in most of rural India that compels women to defecate in the open after dark. 

The two girls never returned. When their families went to the police to report that they were missing, they were ignored. Only when the bodies were found was some action taken and three men were eventually arrested. The trial drags on and the men are out on bail.

More recently, we have the horror story of the rape and murder of a Dalit woman in Hathras, UP, two years ago. Few will forget the images of the grieving family and the forcible cremation of her body in the night by the UP police. Yet here too, there has been no real closure as the family lives in fear in a village dominated by higher castes. Although the government has paid them compensation, it is dragging its feet on the other promises made, such as a house and government job. 

The Indian media’s coverage of crimes against women has revealed a predictable pattern. If a rape occurs in a metro, of a woman or women who represent the consumers of the media, it is investigated and pursued in detail. Think of the Delhi gangrape of 2012, the Shakti Mills rape in Mumbai in 2013, and the Park Street rape in Kolkata in 2012.

Compare that coverage with how the media reported, for instance, the brutal rape and murder of two Dalit women, Priyanka and her mother Surekha, in Maharashtra’s Khairlanji in 2006. It was barely reported. The media only woke up to it much later when Dalit groups investigated the case, agitated, and went to court. Without that intervention, and the fact-finding report by Dalit intellectual Anand Teltumbde, who is in jail charged in the Bhima Koregaon case, we would not have known about this atrocity. 

An additional factor today that determines how the media picks and chooses what atrocity it will pursue is the communal angle that has infected not just the media but society at large. A crime like rape is abhorrent, irrespective of the identity of the perpetrator. It is even worse when the victims are minors. And when they belonged to a marginalised group, that is an additional factor. 

Yet, for some in the mainstream media, these are not the aspects that count in deciding which crime is worth reporting in depth. It is the identity of the alleged criminals. By doing this, the media, especially the most-watched TV channels, is responsible for actively perpetrating the stereotype that has already been constructed through fraudulent concepts like “love jihad” to target young Muslim men. And of spreading a poison that has infected our society to such an extent that we fail to recognise why outrage for unconscionable crimes, like rape, is so selective.

Bengaluru, Pak floods coverage exposes gaps in media’s understanding of climate, development issues

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 8, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/09/08/bengaluru-pak-floods-coverage-exposes-gaps-in-medias-understanding-of-climate-development-issues

In this season of floods, some floods matter more than others. You can see this in the amount of time and space the media accords to some floods, while virtually ignoring others.

Then we have the entrenched politics of water and land, as well as factors that transcend state and national boundaries such as climate change. We in the media should be addressing these politics and the reality of climate change, while covering the current spate of floods in the region which cannot be categorised simply as “natural disasters”.

The floods that matter, and which we report in detail, are those in the big cities. This entails minimum costs for media houses as the crisis is literally on their doorsteps. Those affected are also part of the “market” of these media houses. Floods further afield, in the northeast for instance, do not engage mainstream media in India to this extent.

The coverage of the recent flooding of large parts of Bengaluru, which undoubtedly was big news given the city’s global connections, exposed another aspect of the coverage of floods. While the visuals of upscale villas in gated communities and floating high-end automobiles might make for dramatic footage, we saw little of the devastation caused to the urban poor parked just outside the gates of these colonies.

Also, you had to look hard to find reportage explaining the backstory of why Bengaluru is in such a mess. In fact, such a disaster has been predicted for long by environmentalists and urban planners. They have exposed and campaigned against the destruction of natural lakes around the city, the construction on lake beds and misplaced urban development plans that cater to the demands of private developers. This, and an inadequate drainage system, has had a direct impact on Bengaluru’s ability to cope with excessive rainfall.

The Bengaluru flooding story has been seen in practically every major metro in India, and even in smaller cities and towns. This is decidedly not a “natural” disaster. It is the consequence of how the politics of land, inextricably linked to city and state politics, plays out. Urban development plans are made, only to be ignored. And environmental concerns go unheeded despite the campaigning of determined civil society groups. Practically no political party makes these concerns a part of its agenda. Profits, not prudence, is the mantra all of them follow.

For the media, these recent floods in Bengaluru underline not only the abysmal lack of planning and development in that city, but the gap in the media’s understanding of the larger issues behind this disaster.

For one, understanding the consequences of land use, and the politics behind it, as well as how natural resources such as water are used, or abused, needs to be the foundation for city reporting. Journalists given this beat must understand this politics to be able to report incisively not just on events, like floods, but also on why they occur.

Second, reporters need to understand that the worse-affected in these “unnatural” disasters are those with the least clout in how decisions are made in city development. So, in Bengaluru too, several urban poor communities lost everything they possessed in the floods. Once the waters recede, and there is talk of compensation, the well-heeled will recover from insurance claims. The poor will be left with nothing, especially as in many instances they either do not possess, or have lost, the documentation to establish that they are “legal”.

As urban planner and civil engineer Vishwanath S explains in this interview to Scroll:

“There are a lot of informal areas around the Information Technology hub that have been affected. These areas are not being documented or being shown. They may or may not be legal slums, which is more concerning as that means there is a good chance they would not even have the inadequate drainage systems in place. Then there is the periphery of the state which is being affected, which is not being documented and shown either. The focus has been on the apartments worth Rs 9 crore or Rs 13 crore or the villas which have been flooded.”

Equally important, journalists reporting on cities must comprehend how climate change is affecting our cities in a very direct way, not just by way of extreme weather events. It will help reporters dig deeper to understand the backstory, so that readers or viewers develop a better understanding of why such disasters are occurring so frequently.

Moving on from Bengaluru, the much bigger crisis is what has occurred in what we love to refer to as our “neighbouring country”, that is Pakistan. The scale of the devastation is hard to imagine. The visuals seen on international TV channels, and on social media, are frightening. Just visualising one third of a country under water is tough. Yet that is the reality in Pakistan today.

Although there has been some coverage of the devastation next door in the Indian media, it is not enough. The reason it needs to be much more detailed is obvious. India has not just a shared history with Pakistan, but also a shared geography. As the current director of Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission, Farah Zia points out in this perceptive article in Indian Express: “We’re in it together. ‘We’, as in India and Pakistan. Our weather systems like our history are joined at the hip.”

What is also interesting is how, as in India, in Pakistan too, the media ignored the early warning signs of the floods, because they occurred as early as July in Balochistan which, as Farah Zia writes,“… is not on the media’s radar anyway. It only got attention when an army helicopter on a flood relief and rescue mission, with high-profile personnel on board, crashed on August 2. The province also got the media’s attention once the death toll crossed 100.”

Historian Ammar Ali makes a similar point when he writes in this article in Jacobin that Islamabad-based political commentators were preoccupied writing about politics even as the first information about the devastation was coming through on social media. “Soon, floods began overwhelming areas in Sindh and south Punjab. The first time floods became the main headline on a Pakistani channel was August 23. By this time, more than twenty million people had already been affected, making it the worst natural disaster in the country’s recent history,” he writes.

Maleeha Lodhi, a former journalist who was also a top diplomat, reiterates that while politicians were more concerned about their political agendas, it is Pakistani civil society that stepped in to help. “The exemplary role of the public should be matched by a display of solidarity among political leaders and parties. But this continues to be in short supply”, she writes in this article that first appeared in Dawn.

Ali makes another observation that I think is relevant for us in the media in India.

“The media’s delayed response to the climate catastrophe is partly explained by the fact that the narrative around ‘natural disasters’ does not easily offer a neat categorization of heroes and villains. This turns them into a tragedy that can invoke global pity but is unable to generate political contestation. Yet, politics really is at the heart of the tragedy today unfolding in Pakistan. It is thus imperative to nominate the villains responsible for the needless suffering of millions of people.”

If you noticed, the political blame game has already begun in Bengaluru. It happens all the time when such disasters take place. Yet the real “villains”, which would include all political parties and those who benefit from political power, and the way both flout long-term plans for short-term gains, are rarely identified. That is the role that only an independent media can play, an increasingly endangered species in both India and Pakistan.

From Bilkis Bano to Zakia Jafri, the media needs to ‘keep the pot boiling’

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 25, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/08/25/from-bilkis-bano-to-zakia-jafri-the-media-needs-to-keep-the-pot-boiling

August 15, 2022 will be remembered. Not for the flag-waving or declarations made by the prime minister from the Red Fort, but for the fact that, on this day marking 75 years of India’s independence, 11 men convicted of a heinous crime were granted remission from their life sentences.

Even as the prime minister spoke of women’s safety and empowerment, his home state of Gujarat released these 11 men from Godhra sub-jail. The crime for which they were convicted is horrific, even in the retelling today. Worse still, the survivor, Bilkis Bano, is now condemned to relive it. Yet, as these men emerged from jail, they were greeted with sweets and garlands by members of the prime minister’s party, the BJP.

The Bilkis Bano case is one that should never be forgotten. Soon after dark on February 28, 2002, a five-months pregnant Bilkis, 21, and members of her family left their village of Randhikpur in Dahod district. They hid in fields, hoping to escape mobs that had descended on the village following the Godhra train burning the previous day.

But they could not escape. On March 3, a group of 20 to 30 men carrying swords and sickles assaulted them. They raped Bilkis, her mother, and three other women; and killed her three-year-old daughter Saleha and most of the others in the group of 17. Only three, including Bilkis, survived.

The fact that we remember this case is because it is emblematic of the horrific communal violence that took place in Gujarat, where Muslim women were the targets of the most repulsive acts of sexual violence and assault.

We remember it, but not because the media continued to report it. Some journalists did persist but after 2019, when the Supreme Court asked the Gujarat government to pay Rs 50 lakh compensation to Bilkis, the media lost interest. The only reason it is still remembered is because of this woman’s singular courage and determination to continue her fight for justice with support from civil society organisations.

For the media, the Bilkis case holds out several lessons.

We remember it, but not because the media continued to report it. The only reason it is still remembered is because of this woman’s singular courage and determination to continue her fight for justice with support from civil society organisations.

We have to remember that today, there is an entire generation that has grown up since the Gujarat communal carnage of 2002. They would not have known about Bilkis or the other atrocities during that period. Thus, the significance of this particular case, and the context in which it took place, bears repeating.

If this story had been left to television channels, we would have heard a lot of noise but very little by way of factual background or context. Barring exceptions like NDTV, mainstream TV did not give the recent release of the convicts the attention it deserves. As a result, the significance of what has happened in the context of today’s communal politics, and the historical details that are essential to understand this, would have been lost to most consumers of mainstream media.

Fortunately, the print media in India is not yet extinct and hopefully will continue to survive. Mainstream newspapers, or at least the English papers I looked at, did provide explanatory stories to fill in details that many would either not have known or forgotten. It is interesting that so many mainstream newspapers are now doing explanatory journalism – it seems that there is a demand for this that is unfulfilled by reporting and commentary.

More importantly, newspapers also reported not just what Bilkis and her husband Yakub Rasool felt, but also the response of now retired Bombay High Court judge UD Salvi, who gave the original ruling in 2008 against these men. Justice Salvi also spoke to several television channels and independent YouTube channels, like Barkha Dutt’s Mojo Story. He was clear and unequivocal in all these interviews, stating as he does in this report in Indian Express, that “if it is being said that they are innocent, they did not commit the crimes and hence they are being honoured, it is defaming the judiciary which gave the judgments convicting them”.

There were also disturbing follow-up stories that need to be noted for the record. For instance, Indian Express reported on how the released convicts had been out on parole several times while serving their sentences. Several people living in Randhikpur, who had testified in the Bilkis case, had filed police complaints of being harassed and intimidated by these men during those periods when they were out on parole.

...if it is being said that they are innocent, they did not commit the crimes and hence they are being honoured, it is defaming the judiciary which gave the judgments convicting them.

Justice UD Salvi to the Indian Express

Even more disturbing is this Indian Express report about Muslim families leaving Randhikpur and seeking shelter in a relief camp in Devgarh Baria, where Bilkis Bano and her family have been living since 2017. One of the women arriving at the camp said, “None of us has the kind of courage that Bilkis has shown in the past two decades to fight. On our way here, we came across a huge convoy of the ruling party near Kesharpura and were petrified. I held on to my daughter tight.”

Clearly, this is a story that has not yet ended, not just in terms of legal challenges to the release of the convicts but also the renewed fear in Muslims in a state that is heading for an election. For them, the memories of 2002 have not faded.

Surveys have suggested that editorials in newspapers are not widely read. Yet they are important as a record of the stand a newspaper takes on a particular issue. In this instance, both Indian Express and the Hindu carried strong editorials on the release of the convicts and their subsequent felicitation by members of the BJP and its affiliate organisations. The editorial in the Hindu concluded: “With an Assembly election due in Gujarat at the end of the year, it is difficult not to read political significance into this decision. The sight of the released convicts being greeted and feted on their release will not sit easy on the country’s conscience.”

The other lesson for the media is the importance of memory, of reporters recalling what they reported. For instance, one of those who diligently covered Bilkis Bano’s case, when it was shifted at the behest of the Supreme Court from Gujarat to Maharashtra, is senior journalist Jyoti Punwani. She was able to remind us that the attitude towards these 11 convicts even in 2008, when they were sentenced to life imprisonment, was no different to what it is today. She writes in the Deccan Herald:

“It's not the first time these men, who gang-raped women and killed 14 innocents, including Bilkis Bano’s infant daughter, are being honoured. The day they were sentenced to life in Mumbai in 2008, this reporter saw people touch their feet in the trial court. The courtroom was packed with villagers from Randhikpur, the mood overwhelmingly sympathetic to the guilty. Snide remarks were made against the alleged ‘bounty’ given to Bilkis (there was none). Even others present in court for unrelated matters muttered that shifting the case from Gujarat to Mumbai was a ‘conspiracy against Hindus’. One of those sentenced even declared that he’d done what he had ‘for God’, and that it was ‘a crime in Hindustan’ to belong to the Vishva Hindu Parishad.”

The Supreme Court, in its judgement in the Zakia Jafri case challenging the findings of a special investigative team into the attack on Gulberg Society in which Jafri’s husband was killed, used the phrase “keeping the pot boiling” while referring to those who helped Jafri. As we now know, that particular ruling resulted in human rights activist Teesta Setalvad and former senior police officer RB Sreekumar being taken into judicial custody. Their bail hearing is before the Supreme Court.

I would argue that it is the job of the media to “keep the pot boiling” on issues like the communal carnage in Gujarat in 2002, the continuing attacks on Dalits and minorities in many parts of the country, the human rights violations in Kashmir and the Northeast, and much more. If the media does not do this kind of follow-up, the memory of these atrocities will fade and ultimately disappear, especially when the justice system also often fails.

 

In times of ‘breaking news’, a reminder that good journalism needs patience

 Broken News

August 11, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/08/11/in-times-of-breaking-news-a-reminder-that-good-journalism-needs-patience

There was a time, at least in print media, when reporters were encouraged to find what were called “good news” stories. These days, if you find one, it is entirely accidental. Even so, it is a relief to read something other than stories of political shenanigans, murders and rapes and the spread of communal poison.

The story of how a seven-year-old girl, who went missing in Mumbai in 2013, was finally found early this month is one that was a most welcome change.

In 2013, Mumbai newspapers had reported that on January 22, Pooja left home with her brother to go to school but never came back. She was the 166th girl to go missing as recorded in just one police station. By 2015, 165 had been located. But one remained, as reported in this detailed feature in Indian Express by Smita Nair.

After nine years and seven months, Pooja, now 16 years old, was reunited with her family. She had been lured and kidnapped by a childless couple living in the same area. After they had their own child, the couple sent her away to work with a family just 500 metres from her home, confident that in this period people would have forgotten about her.

In May, Deccan Herald reported on the number of missing children in India. The official figures are probably an underestimate given that reporting is not universal. But they are worrying nonetheless. According to this report: “As per the latest figures of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 59,262 children went missing in India in 2020. With 48,972 children remaining untraced from the previous years, the total number of missing children has gone up to 1,08,234.”

Every story around a missing child contains drama and pathos, more so if the child is a girl. There is always the fear that she could have been kidnapped and trafficked. She could be lost. She might have been taken in by some kind strangers who then decided to adopt her. One reads many such stories.

Yet this story of Pooja has another angle, about a policeman who wouldn’t give up. Rajendra Dhondy Bhosale – a former assistant sub-inspector from Mumbai’s DN Nagar police station, where Pooja’s case was registered – made it his personal mission to try and find her. He did this while he was still in the force, and then continued even after he retired in 2015.

It is also a story about journalism and persistence. What we would not have known is the fact that Bhosale persisted and never gave up. And the reporter, Smita Nair, who with difficulty won his confidence after he retired and persuaded him to talk to her for the 2015 article, kept in touch with him all these years, as she narrates in this podcast. As a result, she was in a position to tell the backstory of this indefatigable ex-policeman.

I mention this particular story because it is a reminder of the many aspects of journalism that are being forgotten in a time of “breaking news” and the push for exclusives.

Good stories require patience. They also need journalists to persist, and to learn to listen, even if what they are being told appears irrelevant to the story they are working on. It is often some irrelevant detail, or the behaviour of a person not central to a story, that leads you to something important.

Unfortunately, few media organisations grant reporters the time to do this. Often, reporters have to pursue stories without any assurance that they will be able to write them for the publications for which they work. For independent journalists, without the backing of a media house, it is even more challenging. Yet the most memorable stories are most often those done by journalists who have these qualities.

These are the journalists who “document the unseen”, a phrase used in a recent talk by Supreme Court Justice DY Chandrachud. Speaking at the Convocation of the OP Jindal Global University, he said, “In the age of fake news and disinformation, we need journalists more than ever to document the unseen and expose the fault lines in our society.”

One of the stories that mainstream media continues not to see is that of Kashmir, or rather only to see and report it partially. By and large, we only read what the government wants us to know about Kashmir such as encounters with militants, or the many apparent achievements of the administration. But is that all there is to report from this region?

Much has been written, including in this column, about how the media has been hollowed out in Kashmir, reducing its once independent media to a virtual cut-and-paste job of government handouts. Forcing independent journalists to either leave the region, or report only for publications outside India and that too at considerable risk. Placing many journalists on a no-fly list without informing them, thereby denying them the right to travel for work. And continuing to imprison journalists whose crime is that they were reporting what the authorities would prefer remain unrecorded.

One could not avoid noticing that on August 5, the third anniversary of the abrogation of Article 370, there was precious little in the print media on Kashmir barring a couple of edit page articles. Most surprising was the Indian Expressrunning a comment piece by the Lt Governor of Kashmir Manoj Sinha as its lead article, with nothing else to balance it. If anything tells us how far mainstream media has travelled in these last years, it is this. Indian Express used to have one of the best bureaus in Kashmir with journalists like Muzamil Jaleel writing incisive reports on developments there. Such reporting has practically disappeared from its pages and is also missing in the rest of mainstream media.

Let me end with this quote from an acerbic piece by Sankarshan Thakur in the Telegraph. He writes about why journalists want access to those in power but what it has to come to mean these days:

“On the face of it, access to those who wield power, those who take the big decisions that impact the people this way or that, is what most good journalists should aspire to. Information, remember, is ammunition. But that is not how access has come to work. It is an invitation to the charmed circle of power, but dog-collared with the omerta pledge, non-compliance to silence will bring consequences...Access no longer allows a journalist information, quite the contrary. Access purchases a journalist’s silence. It’s not remotely an exaggeration to suggest that the journalist is now being accessed by the power establishment than the other way around.”

In fact, the coverage of Kashmir, or the lack of it, is a reflection of precisely this. Thakur argues that Kashmir, or issues to do with minorities are “a handy litmus test” to determine whether media is “anti-national”. On Kashmir, mainstream media passes with flying colours because it has chosen not to “document the unseen”.