Indian press is still to give us the full Covid story. It can't be sidetracked by political dramas now

Broken News (July 16, 2020)

For a fleeting moment this week, it appeared that things were back to normal. Politics dominated the front pages of newspapers, knocking off both Covid-19 and the conflict with China. The Ashok Gehlot-Sachin Pilot imbroglio in Rajasthan and the mystifying responses from the “high command” of the Congress became the main talking points. 

For journalists covering politics, this must have come as something of a relief after months when there was barely any political news of the kind all Indians love: intrigue, speculation, accusations, counter-accusations. 

But as, when and how this particular political natak resolves itself, there are many other stories waiting to be told, of equal if not greater importance.

Four months into the lockdown, editors and media houses are constantly challenged to find new angles to a crisis that appears to have no finishing date. Just when you think a city or a state has done well to handle the pandemic, new cases appear, as in Bengaluru for example. Even Kerala, a model state in every way, has seen a resurgence of cases.

So, how do we report without getting trapped in a maze of numbers that in the end mean little to ordinary readers. For them, the enormity of this crisis lies in the loss of wages, in the inability to access healthcare in time, in the fear that pervades all aspects of life, in the impunity that the crisis has given those tasked with enforcing the rules such as the police, and in the desperation of not knowing what tomorrow will bring.

Often, it is the deep dive, the micro-level reporting that resonates with readers as it reflects their own dilemmas and crises. It reminds us of what this pandemic is doing to the lives of those who struggled to survive even at the best of times.

Here, one must commend the Indian Express for its decision to facilitate in-depth reporting from one district of Bihar, Bhagalpur, for a month. Its correspondent, Dipankar Ghose, has been filing stories that illustrate well the significance of this kind of on-the-ground reporting now, or at any time.

Ghose filed this story on July 6 from the Musahari tola of Badbilla village in Bhagalpur. The district has some of the worst social indicators, such as child stunting. The story from the Mahadalit section of the village, the most marginalised, spoke of the impact of the closure of schools and anganwadis on already malnourished children. The cooked mid-day meal was the only assured source of nutrition for these children. Now it had stopped. As a result, the children had no option but to join their families in begging and collecting waste.

The significance of the story is that it illustrates what is probably happening in scores of such villages across India. We read about schools and anganwadis being shut.  But the consequence is this, children who are forced to beg, or eat rice and salt with a spot of dal sometimes. The long-term consequences of this on children who are already chronically malnourished can well be imagined.

The Bihar government, surprisingly, noted the story and acted. Surprising because one would imagine that at a time when television dominates, a story in print, and that too in a paper that does not have the largest circulation, could be easily ignored by the authorities. More likely, the response was prompted by the fact that the state election is due later this year.

Whatever the reason, according to this story, on July 10 officials were sent to the village with dry rations for the children and a promise of an amount to be sent directly to the bank accounts of their parents. 

The story has clearly not ended here. Whether the grain provided – eight kg of rice for 80 days – will last that long when the whole family is hungry, and whether this will be a proper substitute for the cooked meals they had been receiving remains debatable. But when a story can prod the official machinery to act, it is reassuring for many journalists who sometimes feel they are shooting arrows into a void.

Another illustration of stories that make a mark is this one in Mid Day, a newspaper based in Mumbai that has done some excellent local reporting. It’s about a family that cremated a man they were given to believe was their father by a municipal hospital in Thane, only to find out three days later that their father was still alive and in ICU. The mix-up was brought to light by the family of the cremated man who were desperately looking for him in the hospital.

The follow-up to this heartbreaking story was an expose on the shockingly poor to non-existent record keeping by the hospital. In the end, the Thane Municipal Corporation had to crack down and sack four nurses and transfer the doctors who were in charge.

While this kind of micro-reporting is needed at all times, not only during times of crisis, there are also serious lacunae in the big picture of the pandemic that remain to be addressed. In fact, the Thane story gives us some inkling of this. If, at the hospital level, there is such a casual approach to keeping records, how can we know the real extent of the damage done by the pandemic?

Journalists who have focused on data have questioned the many discrepancies in the figures put out by various government agencies. In places like Mumbai, which has the highest incidence of Covid-19 of any city in India, the lack of accurate data is constantly highlighted by newspaper reports.

If there is such poor record keeping in hospitals as to result in the wrong body being handed over to a family, do we really have accurate data on Covid deaths? For that matter, what about those who do not make it to hospital and succumb to the virus? Do such deaths figure in the official data?

Furthermore, and this has been frequently pointed out, do we really know the true extent of the spread of the infection in the absence of wider testing? Despite the constant reiteration by people in authority that there is no "community transmission", do we really know who is affected most by the virus in terms of class, or location, for instance?

The latter, in particular, is important because the answer to that will reveal how our health systems work or do not work for certain sections. It will also establish more clearly the impact of poverty – more specifically, the poor quality of housing and sanitation – on the spread of the disease. We can guess that these are factors, but we do not have the data to back that conclusion yet in India.

 

In the United States, journalists from the New York Times sued the Centre for Disease Control for detailed data on coronavirus infection and mortality under the Freedom of Information Act. They got detailed data by county that factored in race and ethnicity. As a result, they were able to confirm what was until then just an impression. 

In an interactive article titled "The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequity of Coronavirus", they point out: "Black and Latino people have been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus in a widespread manner that spans the country, throughout hundreds of counties in urban, suburban and rural areas, and across all age groups."

 

One of the reasons for this, the story points out, is poverty and overcrowding as well as lack of access to healthcare.

Given the imperfect nature of data available in India, it is unlikely that these kinds of classifications have been made. But if they were, even on a smaller scale in a city like Mumbai, for instance, we would probably see something of a pattern in both infection and mortality that links to urban poverty and the absence of basic services.

This is something the media needs to pursue because Covid-19 is exposing the fractures that already exist in our society. 

What kind of justice is this?

Column for Mathrubhumi 

(Translated in Malayalam)

July 19, 2020

A woman is gang-raped.  Within four days of making the complaint, instead of the men who assaulted her being put in jail, she is.  This is the extraordinary story of a 22-year-old woman in Araria, Bihar.

It is relevant above all because it exposes, yet again, the problems women who are sexually assaulted face in dealing with the criminal justice system.

In this case, after the rape on July 6, the woman sought out some social workers to help her file the case.  Four days later, when the case came up before a magistrate, she was asked to sign a written statement.  She refused saying she first wanted to know what was in it, something that is a basic right. As she could not read, she wanted the social workers who had helped her to read it out to her.

Instead of understanding the trauma that this woman had already been through, the magistrate was offended and the woman was charged with contempt of court and obstructing civil servants from doing their duty.  She, and the two social workers were sent off to a jail some 250 km away. 

What is worse, the woman's identity was leaked to the local papers who reported it even though it is strictly prohibited by the law.

And while she sat in jail, the men she had accused were free.

This is happening in our country where, according to the latest crime statistics (only available upto 2017), a woman is raped somewhere in India every 15 minutes.  The Covid-19 pandemic is unlikely to have slowed down this assault of women in this country.

The bigger tragedy is that despite campaigns to change and strengthen the law, to make it mandatory that the police register a complaint when a woman comes to them, to use humane methods for the medical examination and to counsel her, the same old story keeps repeating itself.

In the midst of all the reports of death and disease, this particular story stood out not just because it flies in the face of the basic criteria of justice, but that it tells us yet again that just changing the law is not enough.  We have to find ways to make the criminal justice system work for the most marginalised, including women.

In many ways, the protests across the United States and other countries against the racists approach of the police, are based on the same premise: that the justice system fails to protect the marginalised and instead victimises them.

In this particular instance, because the story was reported, and there was a campaign on social media, this young woman was released on bail while the two activists who helped her were denied bail.

But think of the message such an incident sends out to all other women who are assaulted and who try to seek justice.  As it is, if you are poor, you fear turning to the police.  Even when you do, there is no guarantee that your case will be taken seriously.  Even when it reaches the courts, it often fails to convict the rapists because the police are too casual about collecting evidence and making a convincing case.  At every step, it is the survivor of the rape who has to struggle to keep up her courage and her sanity. It is hardly surprising then that so many women still prefer not to report a rape and pursue it through the courts.

Now, after this case in Araria, even the few who know their rights and speak up, as this young woman did, will be afraid that they will be punished.  What a state we have come to in this country.

The pandemic: Mirroring our fragilities

Here's something I wrote for a special issue of the Unesco Courier

https://en.unesco.org/courier/2020-3/pandemic-mirroring-our-fragilities

When you can spot the speck of a fishing boat on the horizon with your naked eye, you know that something has changed. The usual suffocating brown cloud has lifted. The air is clear. And the sky is a blue that you have forgotten.

The world has changed in 2020. A new coronavirus has literally knocked the air out of the world. Each day brings greater uncertainty, more news of death and infection, and increasing anxiety about jobs and the economy as we battle a disease that has no cure – yet.

Nothing can prepare you for the unexpected. But if there is one lesson to be learned, it is that those countries that invested in affordable and accessible health care are today best equipped to deal with an unexpected health crisis.

Given the nature of this new virus – contagious, deadly and swift – one would have expected nations, and people within nations, to come together to fight it. Instead, tragically, we have watched how COVID-19 has laid bare the existing fault-lines in all our societies.

Fault-lines exposed

At a time when a virus is not choosy about who it infects, our societies continue to discriminate against their own people on the basis of age-old entrenched attitudes towards the ‘other’ – be it people from another religion or another race. A pandemic cannot erase hate and prejudice; tragically, it tends to exacerbate them.

Another fault-line exposed is inequality. We can watch what the French economist Thomas Piketty terms “the violence of inequality” playing out in this crisis. Those at the bottom, without a safety net, are also the very people now struggling to stay afloat during this global pandemic.

In India, this “violence of inequality” has played out in a heartbreakingly vivid manner in the spring of 2020, as a nation of 1.3 billion people was locked down to stem the spread of COVID-19. Thousands of men and women – left adrift in cities where they had migrated, looking for work and sustenance – lost their jobs when the economy ground to a halt. With no money or safety net, they were left with no alternative but to set out on foot, walking hundreds of kilometres to reach their homes in the countryside.

They trudged in the heat, with little food and water. Some survived, but many died on the way. The images of this exodus of rural migrants are testimony to how unjust patterns of economic development elevated their suffering in the event of such an emergency.

The third fault-line that runs through every society, but jumps out at times of crisis, is that of gender. Women are “locked down” with their abusers, with few avenues of escape. Yet this phenomenon is not getting the attention it deserves. Could it be because this gross violation of the rights of millions of women across the world occurs even in so-called “normal” times?

Urban poverty

In many countries, COVID-19 has struck hardest in urban areas. The disease has spread rapidly among the urban poor, who live in congested, often unhygienic, conditions. The chances of the people living in such conditions surviving this pandemic are slim – given the poor public health facilities, especially in most poorer countries.

These people literally hold up our cities–  the conservancy workers, those in the service industry, in construction, in small-scale industries, domestic help, caregivers, and many more. Most of them are poorly paid and live in dense urban poor settlements, where there is no running water and inadequate to non-existent sanitation.

In such settlements, the spread of COVID-19 cannot be controlled by way of physical distancing – because the urban poor have no space to escape each other. The lack of running water makes hygiene measures such as frequent hand-washing and disinfecting surfaces impossible.

Affordable housing has rarely been a priority in our cities. The consequence is what we are witnessing today. The overwhelming number of new infections have occurred in some of the most densely-packed and poorer parts of cities – whether in Mumbai or in New York.

A whiff of good news

And finally, coming back to clean air in our cities. The Global Energy Review 2020 (link is external), the flagship report of the International Energy Agency (IEA (link is external)) released in April, noted a record annual decline in carbon emissions of almost eight per cent this year. This is good news. Except that it is a fortunate fallout of an unfortunate crisis, and not the result of addressing the very real dangers of climate change. 

COVID-19 has changed many things, yet changed nothing. But once this crisis passes, there is little to indicate that things will not return to the old, profligate ways of living. We have seen little evidence of any concrete plans to permanently reorder our cities, for instance, so that the poor can live with dignity, or where eco-friendly public transport is prioritized.

There are many challenges ahead, starting with the fundamental overhaul of our health-care systems. Countries, and states and provinces within countries, that have come out well in this crisis are those that have invested in quality public health.

The second is addressing the embedded inequities in our societies. Even the best systems fail in an unequal society. This is a long-term project, for sure, and cannot be addressed overnight. Irrespective of whether we live in countries with strong or weak economies, if there is systemic inequality, it will manifest during crises – by killing those who are already impaired and vulnerable.

“The world has enough resources for everyone's needs, but not for everyone’s greed,” Mahatma Gandhi once said. Yet, it is greed that has fuelled our economies – as borders and boundaries have lost relevance in the global fervour to satiate consumerist appetites. It has also threatened the future of the planet, as natural resources are devoured, never to be replaced.

COVID-19 has compelled us to slow down. But as and when we succeed in overcoming this particular crisis, will we witness a new world order? Will we recognize the precarious existence of millions among us? Will we hear the voices of the women, and the most vulnerable, once the noise of business-as-usual begins?

There are no easy answers. But we can, and must, ask. And, perhaps, hope.

Should news media use the picture of the Sopore child with his grandfather’s body?

Broken News

https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/07/02/should-news-media-use-the-picture-of-the-sopore-child-with-his-grandfathers-body

Questions are being asked about the photograph of a child sitting on his grandfather’s dead body in Sopore, Kashmir. It was released on social media on July 1 after a gunfight between security forces and militants in the town. The security forces insist the man was killed by militants, while his family point out that there are no bullet marks on his car and that the image shows him lying on the ground next to it.

The human rights group Amnesty International has asked why the name of the minor was revealed and why his face was not blurred in the picture as required by the Juvenile Justice Act.

Another question: who clicked the picture? There were no journalists at the site of the killing. The picture was not taken by a professional photographer.

If a security forces personnel took the picture with his phone, why was it released on social media with details such as the child’s name? Who released it? We know that the Bharatiya Janata Party's IT Cell made full use of it on Twitter. In the context of Kashmir, many believe this is part of a propaganda war that is being waged even as shootings and killings continue.

For us in the media, clear lines have to be drawn. A picture provided by someone who aims to use it for propaganda and not a professional journalist cannot and should not be used. Most English language newspapers haven’t used it this morning, although they have carried reports on the killing.

But I can think of several instances in the past where the mainstream media has used such pictures without raising questions. Remember the 2004 picture of the body of Ishrat Jahan and three associates lying on a road near Ahmedabad? The police claimed they were "terrorists" on their way to assassinate Narendra Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat.

This is a longer debate that we in the media must engage in. But the picture from Sopore frames several issues for the media. First, the obvious need to check the source of a picture before using it. Second, unless we have permission to do so, we should always obscure the image of a civilian, especially a minor, in respect for the dead and the living. Third, particularly in a conflict situation such as in Kashmir when life itself is precarious, the choice of pictures used requires greater sensitivity.

The debate over this picture from Kashmir illustrates some other points that I make in this column.

A casualty of times such as these, when one or two issues dominate news cycles, is that other equally important subjects are either overlooked entirely, or covered in passing.
The media takes its eyes off these subjects because the immediate is always more compelling than the long-term.

Environmental issues have immediacy but also long-term consequences. The event – such as an accident, or a natural disaster – gets covered, especially when there is loss of human life. But the main story lies in the before, and the after. And this is often not pursued.
There was a time when space and time were given to researching the past and following up such stories. Beginning in the mid-1980s, major newspapers had full-time environment correspondents whose job it was to do precisely this. The aftermath of a disaster and what preceded it, the stories of negligence, of delay, of callous disregard for human life, of the conditions of the displaced, the injured, whether medical relief had reached them in time – these were as much a part of the story as the actual disaster. Such information couldn’t be marshalled in a few days. It required months of diligent follow-up, something that was actively encouraged by editors.

The environmental disaster that triggered an interest and investment in this kind of reporting was likely the Bhopal gas tragedy. On the night of December 3, 1984, nearly 60 tonnes of the deadly methyl isocyanate escaped from a tank in the Union Carbide plant, killing thousands of people and impairing many more. It’s still regarded as one of the worst industrial accidents in the world.

The story didn’t end in a day. It continued for years. It also resulted in a whole slew of environmental laws culminating in the Environment Protection Act, 1986.

The Bhopal gas tragedy also generated interest in environmental reporting and led to the emergence of many dedicated journalists who followed up on such stories. In the late 1980s, I remember, younger journalists were so fired up that they were willing to spend their own money to investigate environmental stories such as monitoring hazardous industries in the vicinity of urban centres, even if their newspapers did not back them.

In 2020, apart from dedicated environmental portals like the Centre for Science and Environment and Mongabay India, you have to look hard to find the full story behind an environmental disaster.

Take the May 7 styrene leak at the LG Polymer plant outside Visakhapatnam. Twelve people died and several hundred took ill. More than 2,000 people were evacuated from the adjoining RR Venkatapuram village.

In the immediate aftermath, partly because the plant is close to an urban centre, all media covered the accident. But there is a before and after here that's equally important because it tells us how environmental laws are routinely flouted.

When the National Green Tribunal took suo moto notice of the accident, it emerged that the plant, owned by the South Korean LG Chem, had been operating without the requisite environmental clearance from 1997 to 2019, a full 23 years. And this was no fly-by-night operator. It is the biggest chemical company in South Korea.

Also, while the original plant, established in 1961, had hardly any population in its vicinity, Visakhapatnam has since grown and spread like other cities leading to an estimated 40,000 people living near a plant that uses hazardous chemicals, something that runs contrary to environmental regulations detailed in this story in the Hindu.

The parallels to Bhopal are striking. The Union Carbide plant was established in an area that had few houses nearby. By the time the accident occurred, there was a densely populated settlement literally outside its gates. Most who lived there couldn’t escape the deadly gas that night and either died or suffered from chronic health problems. Even today, 36 years after the tragedy, there are reports that the survivors have been affected disproportionately by Covid-19 because their lungs were permanently damaged by inhaling the hazardous chemical.

The bigger industrial accidents are reported, especially when there is loss of life. But if you monitor the media closely, you find every now and then reports about some gas leak, boiler explosion, chemicals dumped in water bodies that disappear from view after the first report.

For instance, on July 1, a boiler exploded at the Neyveli Lignite Corporation’s thermal power plant in Neyveli, Cuddalore district, Tamil Nadu. At the time of writing, six workers had died and 17 were injured.

Yet, on May 7, when the media had turned the spotlight on the LG Polymer plant in Visakhapatnam, a boiler blast had taken place at this same NLC thermal plant, leading to eight workers being injured. Is this a coincidence or is there a deeper story here that needs to be pursued? In this instance, it probably will be because disruption in power supply affects cities where the media is located. But had this plant been in a remote area, and not so big, one wonders if this too would have been buried after some time.

Another example of this is the leak leading to a fire at the Oil India Limited gas well in Baghjan in Assam on June 9. The backstory, documented here, tells us yet again of how environmental regulations were flouted. And the follow up stories are what happens now to the people who were displaced, to the biodiversity damaged as the operations were taking place within a 10 km radius of a national park, and whether any corrective measures will be taken in the future.

This kind of reporting will be an even greater challenge in the emerging media scene in India. Media houses are laying off scores of journalists as this article documents. Newspapers have shrunk in size and their print versions are almost unrecognisable from what they were just three months ago. Most of them are now running with a skeleton staff, all of whom are doing multiple stories. There is no room for specialisation, leave alone the kind of investigative follow-up that these kinds of stories need.

Newspapers, it was once said, were “the first rough draft of history". Unfortunately, when the environmental history of this period in India is written, there will be many gaps that perhaps will never be filled.

Unfair and unlovely

Column for Mathrubhumi

(Translated in Malayalam)

If you replace the word "Fair" with "Glow", is it proof that you are not concerned about skin colour? Thanks to the Black Lives Movement in the US, which has drawn attention to the pernicious problem of race, here in India multinational companies have been compelled to question the content of their marketing campaigns and the nature of their products. 

One multinational company, Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL), which has raked in millions of dollars selling the dream of a fair skin to generations of Indian women, wants us to believe that it has had a change of heart by changing one word in its product. The reality, however, is very different.

For decades, women's groups have objected to the very idea of a cream that will turn darker women fair and in turn, make them more attractive, more successful and certainly more presentable for the marriage market.  They argued that such a concept is not just racist, because it decides a person's worth according to skin colour but in the Indian context it is also casteist, as the marginalised castes are always represented as being darker.  For women, this kind of equation of skin colour and self-worth is even worse in a society where they are regarded and treated as second class citizens because of their gender.

Despite these campaigns, the company went ahead selling the product with the same message: fairer is lovelier.  It made a few changes in its advertising campaign, trying to show so-called "empowered" women but it made no change in either the formulation of the cream, or its name. 

Its success in India only goes to illustrate how our society continues to believe, and reinforce in so many ways, that fair is beautiful and dark is ugly. Generations of little girls grow up believing this, seeing pictures in books, in films, in advertising that always show beautiful women as fair.  Even actresses who have darker skins are forced to take steps to look fairer in order to be successful.

The main objection to this type of product and the message it was sending came from women who were fighting for the rights of women as human beings.  They argued that the worth of a woman should not be reduced to the colour of her skin, or the shape of her body.  Women ought to be respected as citizens, as individuals who have capabilities and talents like anyone else.

Yet, the disease of fairness, that is deeply rooted not just in our colonial past but also in the entrenched system of caste that differentiates between people, will not disappear.  Girls born with a darker skin are always made to feel as if they are inferior.  Their fair-skinned counterparts grow up being liked and applauded for something they did not achieve but something they were born with.  Even if a darker skinned girl is more talented, and indeed more beautiful, she has to struggle much harder to gain recognition than a girl with a light skin, even if she is less intelligent or talented. 

In the US, companies are withdrawing products that promote fair skin.  This is what we need in India, not just a name change.  Only then can companies that have manufactured and promoted such products convince us that they have understood the message that the Black Lives Movement is sending. 

That message is that the colour of your skin should not decide you destiny. That societies that discriminate against their citizens on the basis of their skin colour are racist and unequal. And that to build a just society, the scourge of racial discrimination, and in our case in India also caste discrimination must end.