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”.