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

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 16, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 8, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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