More ‘politics’, less meaning: In mainstream media’s ivory towers, an incomplete budget story

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on July 25, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/07/25/more-politics-less-meaning-in-mainstream-medias-ivory-towers-an-incomplete-budget-story

Once again, Sansad TV, giving live feeds from the ongoing budget session of parliament, trumps other television channels in providing engaging coverage. 

Although reports of the debate over the union budget appear in the next day’s newspapers, they do not capture the diversity of interventions in the house, often by first time MPs. And this time, with an invigorated opposition, there is a robustness to the debate compared to the last decade.

Yet, as media, we must ask whether we have settled into a predictable groove in covering the budget, albeit with entertaining graphics and learned commentary from experts and others. Are we making enough of an effort to reach out to large sections of the population for whom the entire exercise probably has little relevance?

In the 1980s, when I worked with the Delhi edition of a national daily, and before the advent of multiple private TV channels and social media, the vox popconsisted of the reporter stepping out and speaking to the chaiwala outside the office and the workers at the local dhaba frequented by many journalists who worked in newspaper offices located on that street.  

Clearly, this was not representative of what poor people thought, but at least an effort was made to go beyond industry big-wigs and economists to assess what the man – and it was always a man – on the street thought.

At a time of unaddressed unemployment, of economic distress, of the struggle of so many poor people in our cities and countryside to keep their heads above water, surely there is a need to know whether they even know about the budget, whether they care, and if they do know, whether they believe it will make any material difference to their lives.

Also, in a time when we are becoming aware that legacy media, that is print media, and even the mainstream TV channels are not the primary sources of news for a growing number of people, especially the young, it would be useful to know whether they care about the budget, whether they even know what the exercise is about, and whether they think it makes any difference to their lives.  

In the absence of such reporting, entertaining as are the interventions in parliament in the budget debate – and I might add the rather predictable behaviour of Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla who continues to find fault with interventions by the opposition – the story remains incomplete. The union budget is a political exercise, but it also has real life impacts on ordinary people. As media consumers, we need to know and understand what these are.

While the budget session will continue to dominate the news for some time, the understandable media focus on it has overshadowed one of the most important stories reported in the last fortnight.

On July 18, Indian Express carried a front page story about a man called Rahim Ali from Assam.  Rahim Ali fought a 12-year battle to contest the ruling of a Foreigners’ Tribunal in Assam that declared he was not an Indian. The family appealed to the Gauhati High Court but got no relief. Finally, on July 11, the Supreme Court, where the case was pending, declared that Rahim Ali was, in fact, an Indian and the tribunal was at fault for determining his legitimate claim to citizenship by focussing on minor discrepancies in the documents he had presented.

The heart-stopping moment, as you read the story, was to be told that Rahim Ali was already dead. He had died more than two years before the judgement, a broken man unable to face the consequences of the tribunal’s ruling.

As Indian Express wrote in an editorial the next day:

“Ali’s story, at once tragic and absurd, is symbolic of the promises not kept in the fundamental social contract between citizen and state, enshrined in the Constitution’s letter and spirit. Ali’s wife, Hajera Bibi, on learning of the Court’s verdict, told this newspaper: ‘What is the point now? The fear that he lived under, of being taken away, died with him. If they still wanted to call him a foreigner, what would they have done? Picked him up from his grave?’ The question, steeped in sadness and anger, is a reproach. It is also a call for accountability from an opaque and labyrinthine process that casts the onus of proving their innocence on the vulnerable.”

The Express editorial also quotes the shocking official figures released by the Assam government in February of the number of people declared non-citizens by 100 tribunals – 1,59,353 – and the cases that are still pending, 94,149. And it rightly asks: “How many of the 1,59,353 have been unfairly stripped of their citizenship like Rahim Ali? For how long, and by what justification, will the nearly 1 lakh people whose cases are pending live under the Sword of Damocles?” 

That “opaque and labyrinthine process” that the editorial speaks of has been at work for many years in Assam. It drew some media attention in the early years, but as with many stories that are part of a process, and not an event, it slipped off the radar. 

There are surely many more like Rahim Ali, who continue to struggle against an arbitrary system that randomly picks up people and demands that they prove their citizenship. On a visit to Assam in 2019, I met some of these people. All of them carried plastic bags full of documents, their faces creased with anxiety as they did not know how to convince the tribunal that they were legitimate citizens of this country and not “illegal”.

The Rahim Ali story ought to prompt a renewed media focus on the process of weeding out so-called “illegal immigrants” in Assam, an issue that continues to be raked up by the current BJP government in the state. For years, civil society groups working on the ground have been crying themselves hoarse trying to attract media, and political attention, to the ongoing injustice being played out in the state. But the attention is sporadic, not sustained.

For those interested in learning more about this issue, do listen to this in-depth interview with Aman Wadud, a young lawyer who has been pursuing these cases, by LiveLaw. He explains the extent to which this process of determining citizenship is unfair and penalises the poor in Assam. He suggests that the Rahim Ali judgement should be read widely to understand how an Indian citizen can be declared a non-citizen.  

What if India's media believed the disempowered as much as it does those in power

My column in Newslaundry.com

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2019/12/18/what-if-indias-media-believed-the-disempowered-as-much-as-it-does-those-in-power

Broken News

If the unjustifiable violence unleashed by the Delhi police at Jamia Millia Islamia University on December 15 had happened elsewhere, say on a campus in northeastern India, or in a state some distance from Delhi, we would not have seen the kind of nationwide outrage that was evident in the days that followed.

By the same measure, even if this kind of violence had occurred in New Delhi at another time, when there was only state-owned television and privately run print publications, the reaction, if any, would have been muted.

The response to Sunday’s violence was no thanks to the so-called “national”, privately owned news channels located in the capital, for whom the scene of the crime, so to speak, was a stone’s throw away. There were several reasons, but mainly that the authorities could not have snapped internet services in the national capital on the pretext of maintaining law and order as they have done elsewhere in recent months. In Kashmir, the internet blackout has exceeded four and a half months; in Assam and other parts of the Northeast, it’s only now being restored. Thus, what was happening on the ground became known primarily because of social media.

For instance, even as the police were trashing the library at Jamia, we saw what was happening because there were videos and live feeds on social media. We could see students cowering under desks, shattered glass, chairs overturned. We saw students being beaten by the police and the now viral video of two incredibly gutsy women students, Aysha Renna and Ladeeda Farzana, wagging their fingers, shouting and standing up to the police as they tried to save their male friend, Shaheen, from being beaten. None of this was seen on national television.  

Despite their huge presence in Delhi, the non-state television channels could not figure out how to get all sides of the story.  Instead, they resorted to their usual ploy of filling airtime with talking heads.

One channel, NDTV, did show a clip of the Uttar Pradesh police vandalising scooters and motorbikes parked outside Aligarh Muslim University, where protests in support of their peers at Jamia had broken out, but only because, the anchor emphasised, the act had been filmed by their own cameraman. She went to considerable lengths to explain that even though they had access to the videos by students inside Jamia, they could not show them because they could not be “independently verified”.

Yet, despite no “independent” verification, police officials got plenty of airtime to give their version of the story, defending their actions as essential to maintaining law and order in the face of a “mob”. There was no pushback from the reporters who spoke to these officials, leaving them to have the final word.

Worse still, the next morning, some in the print media – who ought to have known better as they are not expected to churn out instant copy the way TV reporters and anchors are – used the words “mob” and “protesters” interchangeably.  The Indian Express had a front page headline that read, “CAB protests: Mob hits the street.”

At a time when we have a government that regards all protest against its policies as “anti-national” and instigated by “jihadists” or “Naxals”, or as the prime minister said at an election rally in Jharkhand, by people who can be “identified by their clothes”, it is incumbent upon the press to make a necessary distinction between a “mob” and “protestors”.  The latter could turn into a “mob” if provoked, or if some amongst them are determined to provoke the police. But it is not inevitable.

If it happens, surely due diligence on the part of the media requires caution. Why repeat police terminology without first finding out how and why the confrontation began? There is a history of peaceful protests deteriorating into violence because of the actions of some people who join them to provoke and, thereby, undermine the reasons for the protest. 

Even if there was no time to establish who was responsible for the violence or the vandalism, at least an element of doubt could have been injected into the headline, so that “mob” and “protesters” were not seen as being coterminous. 

The media does a disservice to the rights of citizens to protest peacefully by drawing this kind of equivalence. It also does a disservice by disbelieving the disempowered, in this case the students, while giving plenty of airtime to those in power.

As it turns out, none of the 10 arrested after the Sunday violence in Jamia are students, according to the police. Who are these people?  Why are crime reporters not digging out these details? And why is the police, always so ready to give out names of people accused of a crime, being so reticent?

A day after the Sunday events, some in the media did make an effort to give the other side, especially Rajdeep Sardesai of India Today who stepped out of his studio and spent time walking around Jamia talking to the students. The visuals in his show mirrored those of the videos on social media by Jamia students of the attack on their library. A shining exception to the rule, as always, remains Ravish Kumar of NDTV India. He has always strived to show the truth, and he did so in this instance as well.

My limited point is that in such a situation, when the dice is so heavily loaded in favour of the authorities, a media which claims it is trying to be “balanced” needs to make a greater effort to get access to the other side. And if the only way of doing that is by “verifying” the content put out by those under siege, as these students were, then it could have been done. Digital platforms like Scroll did much better by running a live blog for 13 hours and including some of the videos.

By directly, or indirectly, endorsing the official version, the media is reinforcing the narrative the government would like it to perpetuate.

The protests in Jamia were covered because they were in Delhi. But people in the Northeast have not been so fortunate. When the Guwahati-based TV news channel Prag News was attacked by security personnel, who entered its offices and beat up some of the journalists, one of its senior editors was heard on one channel literally begging the national media to pay heed to what was happening in Assam.

Senior journalists from the Northeast have also been appealing to the “mainland” media, as they call it, to try and understand the varying reasons for opposition to the citizenship law in the region. The Northeast comprises eight states with distinct cultures and languages, and more importantly, different histories. Yet, for us in the “mainland” it is just a region that is either seen as colourful, because of the exotic tribal cultures, or troublesome, because of the history of insurgencies. 

Pradip Phanjoubam, editor of the Imphal Free Press, points out in his article in The Hindu, “This inability of those outside the Northeast to see what the Northeast sees betrays to an extent an ignorance and an insensitivity to a stark reality small marginalised communities there face.” Patricia Mukhim, editor of the Shillong Times, has also explained, in an article in Mint, the complexities of the diverse reactions in the Northeast to the Citizenship Amendment Act.

Even at a time like this, when so many parts of that region are deeply disturbed by the passing of the citizenship law, and before that by the way the enumeration for the National Register of Citizens was conducted in Assam, precious little effort is being made to educate viewers and readers, or even the journalists who work with mainstream media, on these distinctions within the Northeast. 

Mainstream media reinforces and exacerbates the alienation felt by people who live on the margins, either in geographical terms or in social terms, by either ignoring them, or reporting on their problems through lenses that are blurred with ignorance and prejudice.