From Narmada Bachao Andolan to farmer protests: Why the media must record history

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on November 25, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/11/25/from-narmada-bachao-andolan-to-farmer-protests-why-the-media-must-record-history

 

In his usual dramatic style, prime minister Narendra Modi pulled another rabbit from his topi on November 19.

After a year of ignoring the thousands of farmers protesting at the gates of the national capital, demanding the repeal of the three farm laws rammed through parliament by his government, after dismissing their agitation as nothing more than one that was instigated by "andolan jeevi", people who live for protests, he conceded. The laws are being repealed.

While the debate after the announcement has centered on the motives behind the climb-down, and the lessons all political parties can derive from the determination shown by the farmers, another question that must be asked is what lessons the media can learn from the way we covered this remarkable, and historic, civil movement.

With a media obsessively focused on “breaking news” and dramatic events, something as long lasting, and peaceful, as this protest poses a challenge precisely because it is not one, or even a series of events. It is the result of processes that include the state of agriculture and decades of frustration.

When we look back at this year, what viewers and readers are likely to recall in relation to the farmers' protest is a handful of events, such as the standoff between the Delhi police and some of the farmers on Republic Day this year, and how one group climbed the ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi and raised a flag. Or images of traffic jams on the day the Samyukta Kisan Morcha called for a nationwide bandh.

The result of this kind of bits-and-pieces reporting is that only the spectacular, the violent, the confrontationist, remains in memory whereas the core of this remarkable movement might be erased from public memory.

What will be forgotten, because it was barely reported, was the amazing diversity represented in those who stayed the course over this year. They were women and men from several states, not just Punjab. Many came to show their solidarity. Yet many stayed on. Their stories are worth recording. A few diligent reporters, mostly outside the mainstream from independent digital platforms like Newslaundry, have done just that.

Also, early on the protesters were clear that they could not depend on mainstream media to tell their story. So, they set up their own digital website, Trolley Times.

There were so many stories to tell: the way this protest was organised, that it remained peaceful, that people were fed and housed, that medical aid was available, as this piece by Priya Ramani illustrates.

And let's not forget the women. They were not just helpers, making rotis and being in the background. They assumed leadership roles that only a few in the mainstream media noted.

Fortunately, after Modi's announcement, some in the media made an effort to provide adequate background to readers. The most notable was the November 20 edition of the Indian Express that reported not just the announcement but also provided readers with background of all aspects of the struggle.

And, of course, Ravish Kumar in his primetime programme on NDTV India, who gave us the visuals that we should always remember, including the extent to which the Delhi police went to prevent the protesters from entering the city by digging up the road, embedding spikes, and barricading them with huge containers.

It is not always easy to report on something that continues for so many months. How do you find new angles? Besides, how many media organisations are prepared to assign such movements as a legitimate beat for their reporters? I had discussed in a previous column, marking 300 days of the farmers' protest, the challenges journalists face in covering large civil society gatherings.

A similar challenge faced us decades ago when we reported on one of the longest civil society movements of recent times: the struggle against the big dams on the Narmada River and, specifically, the Sardar Sarovar Project in Gujarat.

The movement, the Narmada Bachao Andolan, was launched in 1985. It began with demanding proper rehabilitation for the people who would be affected by the dam. But in the face of refusal by the Gujarat government to even discuss this, it went on to oppose the construction of the dam.

The NBA successfully mobilised the tribal communities that would be most affected. It also asked questions about the environmental costs of the dam that would submerge many hectares of primary forests. The movement was one of the first to question developmental policies from the environmental perspective. Until then, large and grandiose projects were celebrated as great achievements in a developing country.

For the journalists covering this movement, there were many dimensions that needed to be understood. The perspective of the tribal communities who would be most affected by submergence, for instance. These were people who had lived for decades with developmental neglect such as lack of roads, medical care, education, sources of livelihood, etc. What little they could eke out from their lands and the forests was also being taken from them.

The counter story was India's need for electricity and water for irrigation. It was argued that only if projects were built on this scale could this be done and the collateral, in terms of submergence, was unavoidable.

This was a time when print dominated the media. We did not have 24/7 news channels. Hence, reporters and photographers had to tell this story. And like the farmers' protest, although there were a few dramatic events, the main story consisted of understanding and reporting on the reasons for the resistance, the extent of the impacts of the project, and the stands taken on both sides.

The movement, led by Medha Patkar and her team, did not succeed in stopping the Sardar Sarovar Dam from being built. But the protests drew international attention, and led to serious rethinking in the World Bank about funding such projects in the future.

The fact that even mainstream media houses sent out reporters and photographers to cover this protest played no small role in this. Without that kind of documentation, the movement might have been restricted to the specific areas where people had been mobilised, mostly well away from media centres.

When we look back, it is striking how many journalists followed the story over many years and their news organisations gave them the space to do so. It was an education in how the other half in this country survives. Going to those sites of submergence, seeing the conditions in which the tribal communities lived, understanding their continual struggle for basic survival was a lesson in understanding poverty and misguided developmental policies.

The tragedy is that even those villages that escaped submergence in these tribal districts, because they were on higher ground, continue to suffer neglect in terms of basic health care, education or road connectivity. In all these decades, little has been done to change this reality.

In this 2015 article, "Chronicle of a struggle retold" in the Hindu, sociologist Shiv Visvanathan beautifully encapsulates the decades of struggle by the NBA. He writes, "If you were to ask a middle class person today what the most significant act of history in India of the last 20 years is, most would say this – the rise of Narendra Modi. But to me, the most important historical event of the last two decades has been the battle over the Narmada dam."

The article is a calendar of events starting in 1961 when Jawaharlal Nehru laid the foundation stone of the Sardar Sarovar Project to December 2000, when 350 people trying to present a memorandum to the Chief Justice of India in Delhi about the project were arrested. The most memorable was the Narmada Sangharsh Yatra in December 1990, which was stopped by the Gujarat police at Ferkuva on the border of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. For those, including journalists, who want to get a glimpse of this long and peaceful civil society movement, Visvanathan's article is a vivid summary.

The lands and the forests of the tribals who lived on the banks of the Narmada are gone. The benefits of the irrigation and electricity generated by the project have not accrued to them. But their story has been documented – in films, in books, in newspaper articles.

The farmers who are protesting are not leaving yet. But their story, and that of their movement, awaits similar documentation. Doing this is not being partisan. It is what we ought to be doing. Recording history as it takes place, so that future generations will know why and how thousands of women and men, who grow the food we eat, chose to sit it out on New Delhi's borders in the heat, in the rain, in the cold for a year.

 

From Tripura to climate change, mainstream media needs feet on the ground to report on what’s happening

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on November 11, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/11/11/from-tripura-to-climate-change-mainstream-media-needs-feet-on-the-ground-to-report-on-whats-happening

All of us should be very worried about what’s happening in Tripura. If people are unaware of recent events that have taken place there, the mainstream media in India is to blame.

Bits and pieces of news have trickled out, initially only on social media, since October 26 when mobs led by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad reportedly attacked several mosques and Muslim-owned businesses in the state. This was ostensibly in retaliation for the recent violence against Hindus in Bangladesh.

Why would people in Tripura respond so violently to events in the neighbouring country? Most people are ignorant about the northeastern states in general and, in this instance, about Tripura. We do not know its past or its close links with Bangladesh with which it shares a 856-km border. Despite its history, the state has not seen Hindu-Muslim clashes. The main arena of conflict has been between the tribals and non-tribals. You have to look hard for such information in mainstream media. Yet, as with all such communal conflagrations, there is a specific history as explained in this informative article by Samrat X in Newslaundry.

While the violence itself was worrying, as reported in some detail by Al Jazeera, what has followed is even more troubling. It represents yet another instance of a government, this time the state government in Tripura, weaponising laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act to curb any questioning or dissent. In what was an extraordinary and totally unjustified move, the state government slapped UAPA charges against 102 individuals including lawyers, journalists and ordinary people posting on social media that the state was literally “burning”. For stating this, the government came down with a sledgehammer.

According to a statement issued by the Editors’ Guild of India, “One of the journalists, Shyam Meera Singh, has alleged that he has been booked under UAPA for merely tweeting ‘Tripura is burning’. This is an extremely disturbing trend where such a harsh law, wherein the processes of investigation and bail applications are extremely rigorous and overbearing, is being used for merely reporting on and protesting against communal violence.”

As Indian Express pointed out in its editorial, “this appears to be a part of the playbook of heavy-handedness that has been perfected by governments. This involves the twisting of stringent laws such as the UAPA or the sedition law to quell dissent or intimidate anyone who contests or might contest the state’s version.”

As far as the media is concerned, what we are seeing in Tripura is not new. It is a pattern that is unfolding in many states, particularly those governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party. Enough has been written about this and yet it does not seem to discourage more governments from following this trend.

An article in the US-based Nation magazine goes as far as to state that India has “become a very dangerous place to be a journalist.” Not all journalists; only those that do their job of questioning the state.

The article quotes the findings from a recent survey of the media in India by the Polis Project called “Watch the State”. It reveals that between May 2019 and August 2021, “256 journalists were attacked for doing their job. The police appear to be the main perpetrators in BJP-ruled states, in Jammu and Kashmir, and in Delhi, where they directly report to the ministry of home affairs. The BJP-ruled states are in general significantly more dangerous for journalists than others.”

Even if some people might conclude that this an overstatement, consider this, from the same article: Unesco has ranked India as the “sixth-most dangerous country for journalism in the world, after Afghanistan, Mexico, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen.”

So, yes, Tripura is another warning to the media and all critics of the current dispensation, both at the centre and in several states.

Apart from the dangers journalists face just doing their jobs, Tripura illustrates another malaise in the media: the virtual absence of reporting on many regions, and on many subjects, until disaster strikes. I have argued in earlier columns that media houses are just not investing in news gathering. Stories like the developments in Tripura cannot be written by referring to news agency reports and adding a little bit to them. You need feet on the ground to describe, to report, to verify the developments, and to background them.

Such reporting is missing on a whole range of issues, including environmental reporting. This is more than evident in the background of the COP26, the international gathering discussing climate change in Glasgow. While some news organisations have sent reporters to cover the conference, most newspapers have limited their coverage to reports about what either the Indian prime minister or other heads of state said during the two-day summit. The real substance of the negotiations have taken place after the politicians left. There is little original reporting on that.

Politicians make promises on the international stage. They are lauded or criticised. But in this instance, the real test is how these pronouncements will play out in the context of a particular country.

In India, while the volume of reporting about climate change has increased in recent months, according to the Media and Climate Change Observatory, the quality is what really matters. The reports that appear, apart from quoting politicians, are based on studies and reports by international bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But you have to work hard to find stories that tell us how people are affected, who is at the receiving end of the many impacts of global warming, and whether the steps the government has been taking are adequate.

One website that is focused entirely on environmental issues is The Third Pole. In this article, Omair Ahmed sums up the issue precisely when he writes: “Climate change has a real, powerful impact on billions of people, most of whom do not know or do not use that particular term. It is the story of thirst, poverty, hunger, deprivation and conflict caused by changes to the environment on which they depend for their lives and livelihoods. And like most things political, it is about money, how we make it, and how we distribute it.”

There you have it. Climate change is a developing story that covers all aspects of life on earth. And in India, the impacts are already being felt with 100 districts identified as being particularly vulnerable. From changes in the monsoon patterns to flash floods causing widespread destruction, almost every day there is a story to be reported of communities who survive, and those who don’t.

This is what we in the media need to be doing.

There was a time in the 1990s when several newspapers had designated environmental correspondents. Reporting on environmental issues requires specialised knowledge. Only then can a reporter covering what appears to be a natural disaster make the connections. For the ordinary reader to understand what we really mean by climate change, these linkages have to be conveyed.

This is not always easy as there are many complexities. The problems arising from global warming cannot be presented as binaries, something the media, particularly television, loves to do by pitting opposite viewpoints to create a “big fight”. And the solutions are equally complex.

There is nothing left to debate about climate change. It is here. Governments are being compelled to take it seriously. So must the media. Our job remains to inform, alert, and question.

Big Media as a public watchdog: No bark, no bite

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on October 28, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/10/28/indian-media-as-a-public-watchdog-no-bark-no-bite

The media in India has much to celebrate this week with the Supreme Court ruling on October 27 in the Pegasus case. Of particular interest to us in the media is what the court has underlined about the importance of the freedom of the press. To quote:

"It is undeniable that surveillance and the knowledge that one is under threat of being spied upon can affect the way an individual decides to exercise his or her rights. Such a scenario might result in self-censorship. This is of particular concern when it relates to the freedom of the press...Such a chilling effect on the freedom of speech is an assault on the vital public-watchdog role of the press, which may undermine the ability of the press to provide accurate and reliable information.”

The key phrase in the quote above is “public-watchdog role of the press”. The question we must ask is how much of the mainstream Indian media truly accepts this as its fundamental role, and how much of it has decided that its primary role is to be a cheerleader for the government or party in power.

Look at the editions of newspapers across languages of October 22. Across the board, in newspapers in many different languages, the lead on the edit page had identical pieces, all written by the same person: India's prime minister.

Narendra Modi was accorded pride of place for an article that spoke of the tremendous achievement of “team India” in crossing the one billion mark of Covid-19 vaccinations. The front pages of all these papers also carried reports on this singular achievement with some embellishing it with their own reportage about the difficulties frontline workers faced in reaching people who needed to be vaccinated. These reports also quoted the prime minister expressing sentiments that were similar to those that appeared in the article purportedly written by him.

What's wrong with that, you might ask? Surely one billion jabs is a great achievement? And if the prime minister of a country sends an article to a newspaper, how can any self-respecting editor refuse?

Except that most newspapers insist that what you send to them for their edit pages has to be exclusive to them. If you are sending out a statement to all media, it is a press release. Normally, that would be used as a part of a report, with relevant quotes from it. But rarely, if ever, have all leading newspapers carried the identical article as their lead on their edit page.

Articles on the edit page are also vetted for accuracy, and mistakes are edited out with the consent of the writer. No such thing was done with this piece. Hence, the prime minister claimed that India was the first country to achieve this milestone. However, that is not true. China hit this target a while back without making a song and dance about it and currently stands at 2.2 billion doses.

The prime minister also claimed that this target had been achieved through "Made in India" vaccines, calling this a paradigm shift. This too is not accurate. Previous vaccination campaigns, such as that of the polio vaccine, were also "Made in India". In the case of the Covid-19 vaccine, the most widely used one was manufactured in India by the Serum Institute of India, but is based on the research done in Oxford University and patented by Astra-Zeneca. The fully Indian-made vaccine, Covaxin by Bharat Biotech, has yet to be cleared by the World Health Organisation.

Perhaps all this is nit-picking, details that should not take away from the glory. Yet, should the mainstream media have added to the hype on that day without questioning why it was necessary given that in terms of the percentage of our population that is fully vaccinated it is only around 30 percent? Was it not obvious that the celebrations were planned to make people forget the ugly reality of the gross mismanagement of the second wave of the pandemic, illustrated by those haunting images of the half buried bodies on the banks of the Ganga?

As Churumuri, the pseudonym used by senior journalist Krishna Prasad, wrote sarcastically on Twitter: "One nation, one edit piece: 453,076 Indians have died due to COVID in the last 19 months; thousands more have been deemed too inconvenient to be counted. The opinion pages of today’s newspapers pay a united tribute to them through a prolific leader-writer."

I asked someone senior in one of the newspapers that I had expected might have held back from following the herd why they did not resist. The answer was two words: "government advertising".

This year, there has been a noticeable increase in government advertising in print media. On any day of the week, newspaper readers are deprived of a traditional front page. Page one is now page three, or even five. The majority of government ads are either of the central government, always with the prime minister's face on them, or from the Uttar Pradesh government bearing large photographs of both the prime minister and UP chief minister Adityanath.

Clearly, this spurt of government advertising is not motivated by lack of coverage of government achievements. Far from it. Most mainstream media uncritically cover statements and occasions marking the "achievements" of most governments. Some years ago, Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi government in New Delhi felt compelled to release ads about the work they had done to upgrade government schools and medical facilities because the media gave them very little coverage.

That is not the case now.

With the downturn in the economy, no newspaper can afford to lose any advertising, leave alone this abundance of government advertising. It follows, then, that even newspapers that have asserted their independence from the government narrative by writing critically, and exposing shortcomings in government policy implementation, would not be in a position to turn down a mass-produced edit page article that lands in the editor's mailbox from the prime minister's office. The possibility of advertising being cut off is not a theoretical construct; it has happened repeatedly as a way for the government to express its disapproval.

A few newspapers did attempt some kind of balancing act by writing mildly critical editorials. The Indian Express also devoted a full page with stories about "the foot soldiers" who ensured that vaccinations reached the areas that are hard to reach. The Hindu ran an edit page article a few days later by Congress president Sonia Gandhi countering some of what Modi had stated in his piece.

However, what was missed out in all the celebratory fluff, even that commending these frontline workers and describing their efforts, was that these stories actually illustrated a more basic situation, one that is ongoing irrespective of the pandemic and that has not been addressed. Millions of Indians still live out of reach of healthcare facilities. If teams can go to such lengths to administer the Covid-19 vaccine, why can't the government ensure that these communities have basic healthcare within their reach at all times?

Within days of the prime minister's multiple op-ed pieces being published, this report appeared in a Mumbai paper, Mid-day, describing the reality facing communities living just 60 km away from India's financial capital. The report describes how a 36-year-old woman from Kayri village in Jawahar taluka of Palghar district in Maharashtra died in the process of being shunted from the primary health centre, to the sub-district hospital and finally to Nashik civil hospital, 150 km away. She was nine months pregnant and she literally bled to death. Vivek Pandit, the chairperson of the tribal development review committee of Maharashtra government, is quoted saying, “At least 5-6 pregnant tribal women have died due to complications related to pregnancy in the past one month."

There is little that is new in this story. It recounts a reality that is known to anyone who cares to follow the real trajectory of India's health care. The dazzle of five-star private hospitals in our cities cannot hide this continuing and ugly reality of poor people who are deprived of their right to basic health care. In the India of 2021, women should not die from a pregnancy-related complication.

Yet so many do. And their stories are rarely told.

These are the stories we in the media should be reporting rather than just echoing a government's celebratory rhetoric. Only then can we call ourselves "a public-watchdog".