Our forgotten frontline workers

Column for Mathrubhumi

(Translated in Malayalam)

Link: https://english.mathrubhumi.com/features/specials/forgotten-female-frontline-workers-in-times-of-covid-19-1.4908915

What will our lives will be like when and if this pandemic ends? Will some kind of normality return at some stage? These are questions everyone asks.

What is clear, however, is that what we considered "normal" yesterday is unlikely to return for a long time to come. The pandemic has brought with it some changes that are here to stay.

The cost of the pandemic is measured in human lives, and in the losses to the economy and people's livelihood.  Even these cannot be calculated accurately because every day there is a change.  Around the world, places that thought they had beaten the virus are now seeing new cases emerge.

But there are also hidden costs. We will know of them in the years to come. And one of them has to do with women, especially poor women.

Under the centrally-sponsored Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), lakhs of children under six years, and pregnant and lactating mothers in rural areas get a hot cooked meal every day. The efficiency of the scheme varies from state to state.  Yet, often this is the only nutritious meal these children and women get. It is a lifeline for them.

The army of women who run the anganwadis, the backbone of the scheme, are rarely acknowledged for this crucial work they do.  We don't recognise the problems they face as women, the burdens they carry in their own homes, how they struggle to find the transport to get to work, or visit the families of the women and children.  They are our forgotten frontline workers.

Today, the absence of these women is being felt by millions of undernourished children and pregnant women.

The system has virtually broken down in many states because of the pandemic. Due to the lockdown and the absence of public transport, anganwadi workers are unable to go to work. As a result, anganwadis are closed.

The daily cooked meal cannot be prepared.  State governments have resorted to giving out dry rations instead. And pregnant women are not getting nutritional supplements, nor are infants being vaccinated.

The packet of dry rations helps but does not solve the problem.  In tribal areas, it is a challenge to ensure the rations reach the families. Even if they get them, the entire family shares the food. With women socialised to eat last, and least, a pregnant woman is unlikely to get the nutrition she needs.

This state of affairs, stretched over many months, will have a direct impact on the health of these children and women. The exact extent of this will only be known a year or so down the line when surveys establish the extent of child malnutrition and mortality as well as maternal mortality.

This is tragic because with all its faults, the ICDS has been a central part of improving the health of women and children, especially in rural areas.  India's statistics on child mortality and nutrition as well as maternal mortality have improved, although some states like UP and MP continue to lag behind.

It is equally worrying that in cities, like Mumbai for instance, the same thing is happening.  In slums, anganwadis have closed down.  There are no hot meals.  Pregnant women, who would earlier have been fairly confident of accessing a hospital for delivery, are now worried about infection, and the lack of available hospital beds. 

Such women include many who are married to workers from other states.  These men have no work, and no money. The women are not in a condition to travel and return to their villages. They live in dense slums without basic facilities of water and sanitation. What happens to such women during this time?

It is time to think about these hidden costs, and these forgotten frontline workers.

What the decline of opinion pages tells us about the media's role in India

Broken News

https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/06/18/what-the-decline-of-opinion-pages-tells-us-about-the-medias-role-in-india

If you put four Indian television news anchors in one jar and shake it vigorously, you will probably get at least 10 opinions. Maybe more. Television news in India today is dominated by opinion, of anchors and the talking heads invited on primetime shows. For the ordinary viewer, it’s virtually impossible to separate fact from opinion, even fiction.

Yet, journalism schools in this country continue to churn out women and men who enter the profession with the belief that the two should be separate.

It is this change brought about by TV news that makes the ongoing debate within the American media about the role of opinion pages seem a little distant from our reality.

There, a controversy erupted on June 3 when the New York Times ran an opinion piece by Republican Senator Tom Cotton headlined “Send in the Troops”.  A virtual brawl broke out, including in the newspaper's newsroom, where African American reporters saw this as an assault on their personhood at a time when the country watched police brutally suppress peaceful protesters calling out entrenched racism. It also triggered a debate on whether the opinion pages of an important newspaper should be open to such extreme views. The debate has been covered in some detail in this piece in Newslaundry.

In India, is this debate relevant given the nature of opinion pages in our newspapers and the fact that the debate about separating opinion from straight news reporting has already been settled by dominant Indian TV news channels? The print media still largely sticks to this concept of separation but with TV being the major source of news, do readers of print really appreciate the difference?

In the days when print was king, the opinion pages of leading newspapers were considered important. Editors of major newspapers in the 1970s and 80s, all men, were names to be reckoned with and their regular columns were widely read. Names like Sham Lal, NJ Nanporia, Frank Moraes, Girilal Jain, G Kasturi, and many others were high-profile because they articulated opinions that people in power took seriously.

With the opening up of the economy in the 1990s and the profit element coming to dominate the content of newspapers, the opinion pages inevitably took a hit. In one newspaper where I worked during this transition period, not only was the position of editor-in-chief abolished, we were informed that as only three percent of our readers looked at the edit page, so its contents would have to be rethought. That change took a while to come about but today the edit page of this newspaper is unrecognisable from what it was in the 1980s.

Does any of this really matter? Indian edit pages vary greatly, from ones that carry a variety of views, including ghost-written pieces by leading members of the party in power, to those with strongly argued opinions on a range of subjects by academics and experts.

But would even those newspapers that permit such variety, even as their own unsigned editorials clearly indicate the views of the paper, permit a piece that wounds people already at the receiving end of state terror? It was argued that it was insensitive of the NYT to run Cotton's piece at a time when African Americans, including reporters, were at the receiving end of the police’s excesses.

In India, would any mainstream newspaper permit a blatantly Islamphobic comment or one that advocates for more force to suppress legitimate protests by people who are victimised? A broadsheet newspaper is still expected to convey a level of sobriety, unlike the nightly shouting matches on TV. Hence, giving space to views that hurt a segment of the population directly cannot be justified by arguing that opinion pages represent a range of views and do not reflect the editorial policy of a newspaper. Ultimately, the editor does make the choice.

While the US debated the role of opinion in the media, there was little to no debate in the Indian media on the new media policy introduced by the Jammu and Kashmir administration on June 2. It ought to have been debated, and opposed, because such a policy in one part of the country represents a danger to press freedom all over the country.

The policy is worrying for more than one reason. One, it has been imposed in a region where the absence of proper connectivity has restricted the ability of journalists to function for over 10 months now. Second, the continuing intimidation, arrests, and registration of cases against journalists, combined with the selective release of much-needed government ads to the newspapers that survive has already ensured that it’s risky and virtually impossible for journalists to report what is going on in their region.

On top of that you now have a policy where a bureaucrat, or a policeman, can decide what news is "fake" or "inaccurate", and take action against a journalist or a media house. The Indian Express was one of the few newspapers that came out with a strong comment against the move. In an editorial headlined "Ministry of Truth", the newspapers commented:

“The New Media Policy of the Jammu & Kashmir administration resembles 1984 in its 53 pages of rules and regulations on what is news, the setting up of a mechanism for ‘monitoring’ of fake news, conditions newspapers need to meet in order to be empanelled and under what circumstances they will be ‘de-empanelled’. The J&K Directorate of Information and Public Relations may not have George Orwell’s vocabulary but the framers of this policy have managed to provide a remarkably clear picture of the media they want – journalists and news organisations answerable not to their readers, nor even to their editors, but to government bureaucrats and security officials, who will have the powers to decide which news item is fake or ‘anti-national’; and with these determinations, to further decide the economic viability of a newspaper through the carrots and sticks of government advertisements. Officials will sit in judgement on journalistic ethics and issues of plagiarism. All this for building ‘a genuinely positive image of the government based on performance’, and to ‘build public trust’ and ‘increase public understanding about the Government’s roles and responsibilities’.”

How can the rest of the Indian media sit back and accept this policy? If it is applied in J&K today, what stops the people in power trying to extend some parts of it to the rest of the country?  Already we have seen how the central government has pushed a narrative that it wants the media to echo during the current pandemic. This is not the role of the media in a democracy.

The Indian media has already moved away from many fundamental tenets of the mission that the media ought to undertake in a democracy, even a troubled one like ours. And this has happened without direct censorship, or even a media policy like the one imposed in Jammu and Kashmir.

David Greenberg, writing in Politico, describes what he considers is the role of the press in America:

The reality is that advocacy and objectivity, which have both animated American journalism for ages, will always be in some tension. Men and women in every era have gone into journalism to make a difference in the world – to expose corruption, hold power to account, tell stories of the ignored or oppressed, shock the public into reforming business or government, or use the power of the press to right wrongs. But American newspapers and news networks have also since the early 20th century consistently prided themselves on truth and accuracy – striving as much as possible to prevent individual biases and prejudices from slanting the news coverage. Like poets who fashion beauty and meaning within the confines of a strict meter and rhyme scheme, the best journalists find a way to call attention to urgent social or political causes even as they preserve a reputation for fairness and open-mindedness.

"Fairness and open-mindedness". Under a regime that considers such values "anti-national", is that even possible in India?

Media isn’t in the 'positivity' business. Its job is to show the ugly truth

Broken News

https://www.newslaundry.com/amp/story/2020%2F06%2F04%2Fmedia-isnt-in-the-positivity-business-its-job-is-to-show-the-ugly-truth?__twitter_impression=true

 

“Negativity, negativity, negativity,” intoned India's solicitor general, Tushar Mehta, in the Supreme Court on May 28. He was referring to the media and others critical of the government during hearings on the notice that the apex court had taken up suo motu on the worker exodus. 

"Positivity, positivity, positivity," was the advice Narendra Modi's government gave to media owners before the first national lockdown to contain the spread of Covid-19 was announced on March 24.

Between these two dates, and the expression of these two sentiments lies the chasm between the government’s understanding of the role of the media in a democracy, and what the media understands as its role in a functioning democracy.

This negative-positive binary that this government in particular seems determined to pursue, not just in relation to the media but also to any opposition to its ideas and plans, is something that all of us need to be worried about. For civil society critics, there is the real and present danger of being arrested on all manner of charges ranging from sedition to terrorism.

As for the media, for the six years that the Modi government has held office, much of mainstream media has chosen the "positivity" message, finding no contradiction in openly cheerleading for the government.  Fortunately, a few continue to cling on to what they perceive as their role of holding the government to account. But their numbers are dwindling as economic and political pressures chip away at their resilience.

Coming back to the solicitor general’s “negativity” rant, should the media be considered “negative” because it has persisted with the story of the exodus of workers from our cities? This story has refused to disappear for over two months after the first batch of workers began to find ways to return to their homes. It is a story that could not be avoided, need alone be faked as the government suggested at one point. In its sheer magnitude and its many tragic outcomes, no journalist or media house worth their salt could have turned their gaze away.

In fact, because the stories continue to pour in, the visuals are still printed on a daily basis and the moving images are shared on social media, India's highest court was compelled to wake up and take suo motu cognisance of the unprecedented tragedy unfolding in this country.

Why has the media persisted with the story?

Even if one goes by the cynical criteria of what mainstream media chooses to cover, this is one story that fits the bill. In its size – literally thousands of people on the move; its pathos – the way they chose to travel; and the tragedy – of the people who died enroute or just after they got to their destination. Also proximity – the fact that the workers left from large metropolitan centres where the media is based. This ensured that the story could not be missed.

Imagine if the situation was in the reverse. That because of hunger, starvation and lack of work, thousands of people had set off on foot from their villages to the cities. They would still be deemed “migrants” because they were migrating to another place in search of sustenance. But it would have taken a while longer for the media to wake up to what was happening because it was not in their backyard.

Yet, I would argue, even in this reverse hypothetical scenario, the story would have had to be covered. And even if this imagined exodus had been triggered by callous government policy, as it has been in the present instance, it would not matter. The politics of individual media houses would not be able to obscure this "event", given its size and spread.

Something similar is happening in the United States in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by a policeman in Minneapolis. Even media houses that are generally supportive of President Donald Trump, such as Fox News, have covered the protests extensively.

In both India and the US, although the stories are very different, the government, or its agents, is choosing to literally shoot the messenger instead of paying heed to the substance of the stories.

In India, journalists have not been attacked by the police for covering the worker exodus story. But the solicitor general compared journalists to “vultures” in his intervention in the Supreme Court. This is an old and tired trope based on the iconic image of a starving child and a vulture in famine-gripped South Sudan shot in 1993 by the late Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Kevin Carter.

That Mehta brought this up is not surprising, but it is more than a little amusing that he got his facts wrong because they were based on a WhatsApp message that was being circulated, as this story in AltNews points out.

The comparison between vultures and news gatherers has persisted through decades. It is not always a simple choice for a journalist on the beat to decide whether to intervene in a humanitarian crisis or during conflict before filing the story, or to wait until the story is out and then see how to help.

Dar Yasin, one of the three Associated Press photographers from Jammu and Kashmir who recently won a Pulitzer, chose to intervene in 2017 when he put aside his camera and carried an injured girl to safety during a violent incident in Kashmir. 

On the other hand, if the information does not get out at that instance, there is also a possibility of many more lives lost, or greater tragedies unfolding. So it is a tough choice that journalists make and live with. Furthermore, the mental stress that they encounter is not fully recognised or addressed. And there are those who cannot live with it, as in Carter's case who took his own life within months of winning the Pulitzer.

In the case of the worker exodus story in India, the image that lingers is that of the child pulling at the blanket that covered his dead mother at the Muzaffarpur station. The video was seen widely, it was not shot by a journalist, but its authenticity was not in doubt. Journalists spoke to the woman's brother-in-law with whom she was travelling and followed up with the family after they managed to return to their village. 

Often, a few such images memorialise an entire story.  What is “negative” about them, in the government's language? I would argue that telling such a story is the “positive” of a free press in a democracy. This story, amongst many others, has shaken even the most indifferent into "seeing" the invisible millions that are also citizens of this country.

Similarly, if ordinary people had not filmed George Floyd's killing in Minneapolis, and the media had not taken it on, we would not have witnessed the outpouring on the streets across the US as people demand an end to the brutality of the police and the entrenched racism in the law-enforcing machinery.

The media that set out to cover these demonstrations has also been targeted by the police, but selectively. This report in the Washington Post states: "For black journalists, the civil unrest in cities across America isn’t just a big story. It’s personal." The story recounts the number of incidents where black reporters were specifically targeted by the police, including the now famous incident of CNN reporter Omar Jiminez being arrested even as he was politely negotiating with the police about where he and his crew should stand to report.

In the US, these incidents have yet again exposed the persistence of racial bias in all spheres, including in the media. In fact, as the Post story points out, despite the 1968 Kerner Commission that exposed the problems with a white-dominated media, and the efforts since then to make newsrooms more diverse, an analysis of newsroom composition in 2018 showed that 77 percent of employees are white. An analysis of newsrooms in India throws up similar statistics of the domination of upper caste Hindus.

It is not entirely paradoxical that the media in the US and India face similar challenges. In the US, the media has to contend with a president who is constantly deriding it and dismissing anything critical as fake. In India, we have a government that is not averse to using its powers to enforce "positivity" and patriotism in the media, and insisting that anything else is untrue and unpatriotic.

Women make better leaders

Column for Mathrubhumi (translated in Malayalam)

(Published May 24, 2020)

In 2009, I met a woman sarpanch in Nawada, Bihar. What struck me most about her quality of leadership was her willingness to innovate, and her ability to admit that she did not know and understand everything. She was barely literate. But she was recognised, even by those opposed to her, for the work she had done that benefitted the entire community.

Today, as the world continues to struggle with the Covid-19 crisis, where even in countries with a good health infrastructure, the virus is claiming lives in large numbers, the question of effective leadership is being discussed.

What are the qualities we need in a leader at a time of such a crisis, where a disease does not discriminate between class, caste or religion, where this so-called "common enemy" should unite us to minimise death and affliction? 

First is the ability to understand science or defer to those who do.  Second is empathy, so that those who get the disease feel assured that they will get treatment. Third is honesty, a willingness to admit that the challenge is beyond one individual and that everyone's help is needed.  Fourth is the ability to communicate simply and directly to people, especially the most vulnerable. And fifth is decisiveness but not arbitrariness.  In other words, even if tough decisions are taken, they are done with consultation with a wide range of people and interests.

It is fascinating to observe how during this global crisis, women leaders have become the focus of discussion about effective leadership.  Whether it is Kerala's Health Minister, K. K. Shailaja, or the head of the centre for disease control in South Korea, Jeong Eun-Kyeong, or women who lead governments, like the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of Norway, Erna Solberg, or the Prime Minister of Finland, Sanna Marin, who leads a four party coalition, each led by a woman, their skill in dealing with this crisis has become a talking point.

Even older and more experienced leaders like Germany's Angela Merkel, who is a scientist, has been praised for the sober and simple way in which she has communicated the problem to her country. As a result, Germany has done far better than other European countries like Italy and Spain.

We certainly cannot generalise and say that in all circumstances women make better leaders. But today, there are only 7 per cent women heading governments around the world. That is why it is remarkable that so many of them are being noticed for the quality of leadership they have given at this time of crisis.  They have illustrated, by the way they have acted, each of the five qualities mentioned above that are needed in a leader at such a time.

We could argue that all the women mentioned head countries with small populations, or as in the case of Kerala, also a smaller population than other Indian states. Managing countries as large as India or China, or even the United States is far more challenging. But even in India, the Kerala model can be followed by other states, and in the spirit of federalism, the Centre should encourage this.  In the US too, some states have done better than others.  Rather than imposing a uniform policy for the whole country, a more inclusive, and decentralised plan would be more effective.

The common factor in the quality of leadership of these women is their ability to listen and consult.  You notice that they always use the term "we" when they speak, and not "I".  Being a leader at this time is not about the image or ego of one person. It is about how leaders motivate people to participate in handling this crisis. This is one area where the men can certainly learn from women.

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.