Why India Today’s JNU sting did more harm than good

Broken News

(Link: https://newslaundry.com/2020/01/15/india-today-jnu-sting-abvp-violence-left)

By attempting to be balanced and condemning all sides equally, the media is simply reinforcing the narrative of the state. That is not our job.

From the swirl of accusations, viral videos, injured students and teachers following the attack by a group of masked men and at least one woman in Jawaharlal Nehru University on January 5, several questions related to the media have arisen.

There is already considerable analysis of the way TV news channels have covered the JNU violence, including on Newslaundry.

What has not been talked about is the ethics of the sting operation conducted by India Today, what the news channel calls the “JNU tapes”. On January 10, even as a Delhi police spokesperson was telling the media that an investigation into the violence had begun and nine students had been identified (seven from the Left groups and two from the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, although the spokesperson inexplicably failed to mention this fact), India Today reported that it had identified two of the “assailants” from January 5.  And that both these students were with the ABVP.

The tapes showed a young man, a first-year student in French named Akshat Awasthi, boasting about what he did on the evening of January 5: how he beat up a man with a beard he thought was Kashmiri, how he trashed parts of the Sabarmati hostel, and how he was responsible for rounding up another 20 students who joined him.  With him was another first-year student named Rohit Shah, who said very little except that he had given Akshat his helmet to prevent him from being injured. 

The sting also included a short statement by Geeta Kumari, from one of the Left groups, who admitted that they had shut down the server room to prevent students from registering for the new semester. In fact, students from Left groups had already admitted this publicly and were openly squatting in front of the server room to block access. 

So what did India Today achieve by this sting? Predictably, the ABVP denied that Awasthi was a member or office-bearer of the group.  Not much was heard about the other student. Alt News, the diligent fact-checking website run by Pratik Sinha, however, did establish Awasthi’s association with the ABVP, something that India Today did not do. 

The sting reiterated what was already known by the time it was shown, that the ABVP was responsible for the violence that occurred in the evening on January 5. In fact, even the police acknowledged this when they named two people from the ABVP, Shiv Mandal and Vikas Patel, amongst the culprits.  Despite the absence of footage from CCTV cameras, which the police claim did not work because the server room had been shut down, they could zero in on these men because the media had posted photographs and videos of them from which they were easily identified.

Yet, why did the police name more people from the Left groups, including Aishe Ghosh, president of the JNU Students' Union, who suffered a serious head injury? That is a story that’s still unfolding.  In response to a petition by three JNU professors, the Delhi High Court has instructed the police to identify the people on two WhatsApp groups – Friends of RSS and Unity Against Left.  Within a day of the violence, print and online media had already broken this story and reported the messages being exchanged on these groups just before the violence. The court has asked the police to confiscate their phones. If and when the Delhi police do this, the number of ABVP members named ought to exceed the seven from the Left.  But for that we must wait.

The question that needs to be asked about the India Today sting is that if the involvement of the ABVP had already been exposed by the story on the WhatsApp groups, and two of their members had been identified by the media, what did their exposé achieve?

The main problem, in my view, was the false equivalence the channel sought in the name of being “balanced”. The public acknowledgement of a member of the Left about the server room was juxtaposed with a video that had been posted by an ABVP member on social media. This showed Ghosh and some hooded and masked students, none of them carrying sticks or any other potential weapon (with the strapline “masked mob”), running towards one of the hostels. There is nothing in that video to establish that this so-called "mob" was responsible for any violence.

Meanwhile, the anchor, Rahul Kanwal, asked this question: “Was this the trigger for violence on January 5?” This was clearly an attempt to suggest that both sides were equally responsible for the violence later that day.  And as if to confirm this, when Awasthi is asked on hidden camera why they went about beating up people, he says, “It was a reaction to their action.” Where have we heard this before? The man who said words to this effect in Gujarat in 2002 is now the prime minister of India.

Thus, there are basically two troubling questions about the India Today sting. One is the sting itself and the old debate on whether this is journalism. It is a question that has been discussed in India and elsewhere and the jury is still out. The Poytner Institute has four basic precepts it suggests should govern those deciding to use this method.  They are:

●     The information revealed should be of profound public interest or prevent harm to individuals.

●     A sting should be used only as a last resort – a recourse after all other means of reporting have been exhausted.

●     The journalist and news organization methods should reflect excellent journalistic practice and commitment to truth.

●     The value of information revealed through subterfuge should outweigh any harm caused by the act of deception.

Those who wish to read more on this and can do so here.

The Readers’ Editor of The Hindu, AS Pannerselvan, also argues, “Apart from the ethics and accepted norms, I also feel that this technique exposes only the gullible, who are not at the top of the political pyramid.” This is relevant in this instance as the sting exposed two young men, lightweight members of the group responsible for the violence. No one from the ABVP is going to come to the aid of Awasthi or Shah. One of them is reportedly absconding for fear of being arrested. Meanwhile, the real masterminds have still to be exposed.

The other is that of false equivalence in the name of balance. India Today kept repeating that what happened on January 5 was not a question of “Left vs Right, but Right vs Wrong”. Such a formulation is not just disingenuous but also dangerous. It leaves open the question of who decides what and who is wrong and what and who is right. Not surprisingly, in Mumbai, this was picked up by the BJP spokesperson Shaina NC and displayed on a banner outside her office on Marine Drive.

It is unfortunate that some in the media are linking the violence of January 5 in JNU to the events of the previous days. While the latter establish the long simmering tension between ideologically opposed student groups (nothing new in JNU), the violence on the evening of January 5 speaks to a planned attack by students and outsiders, of a university administration that failed to intervene, and of the police that just stood by and allowed the mayhem to continue. There is simply no equivalence between the two. 

By attempting to be balanced and condemning all sides equally, the media is simply reinforcing the narrative of the state. That is not our job.

Beyond Kanhaiya Kumar

March 6, 2016

Something really unusual and encouraging has been happening in the last days. Apart from JNU, which has been in ferment, young people in many other parts of India seem to be waking up and speaking out as never before.

I spent all day yesterday surrounded by enthusiastic, intense youngsters who hung on to every word spoken by a range of speakers about secularism, communalism, democracy, the media, and history. The meeting was organised by a small group who call themselves the Mumbai Collective.  I can't remember such an electric atmosphere in this city in a long time. Keeping my fingers firmly crossed that this is not a passing phase but part of a deeper churning.

My piece in Scroll.in

Beyond Kanhaiya Kumar: Is this the student awakening that has been a long time coming?

Kanhaiya Kumar’s words, as he delivered his passionate speech in Jawaharlal Nehru University hours after being released on bail following 23 days in custody, will continue to reverberate in our ears for some time to come. “We want freedom in India, not from India,” he said as he went on to define what he meant by that freedom, that “azadi”.

Kumar left those who listened to him at the venue, and on television, speechless. He probably left his detractors, who have called him “anti-national”, sleepless. For what Kumar said on the night of March 3, and what he represents, cannot be ignored anymore.

But is this the story of only one exceptional person, a young man not just with admirable oratorical skills but also commitment, perspective, passion, courage and insight? Or does this represent an awakening among India’s students and youth, a stirring that has been a long time coming?

Rise and spread

What began in September 2014 in Jadavpur University in Kolkata in the form of a demand to investigate an incident of sexual harassment, spread to the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune in June 2015, when the students went on strike against the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan to head the institution.

Like the “infection” the Delhi High Court judge who granted Kumar bail fears, it then spread to the Hyderabad Central University in August 2015, culminating in the tragic death of Rohith Vemula in January this year. And then on February 9, JNU became “infected” as students demanded their right to protest and were instead charged with sedition and being “anti-national”.

Since the arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar on February 12 on charges of sedition and the subsequent arrest of two other JNU students, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, students from many more universities across India have come out in their support. This kind of solidarity among students across universities has not been seen in recent times.

These protests could, of course, subside. The majority of students might decide to get back to classes, and to worrying about their careers. But the chances that this “infection” will spread are greater because the JNU students and the Dalit students from Hyderabad Central University have widened the ambit of their protests. It is not just freedom of expression that they are demanding; they are equally passionate about freedom from caste. It is this combination that must worry the current dispensation at the Centre, or at least should worry them.

Past passion

You would have to delve quite far into your memory to remember a time when Indian universities were in ferment. But there was such a time. If you were in any university or college in the 1960s or 1970s, student politics was alive. There were passionate debates about the country’s future, about injustice and about freedom. There were Gandhians, Socialists, Communists, Maoists. I can’t remember too many Sanghis in those days.

Whether you were politically inclined or not, expressing your views on everything and anything was the norm. And no one was afraid. There was no one telling you what was allowed or not allowed. And there was certainly no one accusing anyone of being “anti-national”, not even if you believed that “power came out of the barrel of a gun”.

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the Naxalbari movement at one end, and Jayprakash Narayan’s call for Total Revolution at the other. Both attracted educated young people, including students who left their studies to go and work in the villages. There were study circles and intense debates. Many young people who followed JP dropped their surnames so as not to identify with any caste. Despite opposition from parents, young people were giving up jobs, education, comfortable homes to follow their convictions. They did not want to wait, to be safe. They wanted to take risks.

For the young people who were politicised in the early 1970s, the declaration of Emergency by Indira Gandhi in 1975 was an inflexion point; it confirmed their worst fears about the Indian state. When the Congress Party president DK Barooah declared that “India was Indira and Indira was India”, the frame within which rights, such as freedom of expression, could operate had been set. If you were critical of Indira or her policies, you were against India, hence anti-national. In today’s context, this sounds creepily similar.

Lessons not learnt

Although there have been other galvanising events that have drawn out young people since the end of the Emergency in 1977 and today, I would argue that there has been nothing that has been this widespread. The issue of communalism did bring young people out on the streets after the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 and the Gujarat violence in 2002. But their participation was not on the scale we have seen today.

Since the 2014 election and the formation of the Narendra Modi government at the Centre, the demand for “azadi”, in the way Kumar describes it, has been spurred because the state now defines what we can say and cannot, what we can do and cannot, what we can eat and cannot, what we can read and cannot. You don’t have to be a student of JNU to understand that this is unacceptable. Young people have always demanded the right to question, to rebel, to choose their own paths. As Kanhaiya Kumar presciently pointed out, the more you push them down, the stronger they will emerge.

This is precisely what has been happening. Instead of recognising the legitimacy of the demands being made by students on these different campuses, the government has chosen the hammer of “sedition” and the “anti-national” label to knock them down. In turn, it is now facing the ballooning rebellion of students, political and apolitical, who instinctively react against arbitrariness and oppression.

Pertinent reminders

What is particularly pertinent about the struggles of the students in JNU is that they are going beyond demanding freedom of expression. By placing on the same plate caste oppression, these youth have launched a campaign that has relevance and should have resonance. Relevance because it is unacceptable that in 2016 caste should still be a factor that determines a person’s future in this country. And resonance because in 2014, as Kumar reminded us, 69% of the voters did not vote for Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party. There is a large constituency of people out there who do not subscribe to identity politics and the divisiveness that is being deliberately fuelled by this government.

Kumar has also reminded us that there is an India that lies beyond university campuses and television studios. It includes places like his village, where his mother is an anganwadi worker. He is in JNU only because there is a system that accommodates people like him. In those places beyond the reach of the media, what is “India”, what is “the nation”, who is a patriot and who an “anti-national”? Does it really matter?

Listening to Kumar’s passionate speech at JNU, I recalled an incident from 40 years ago. I was meeting students at a village school in Panchgani, western Maharashtra. They were curious about Bombay. Some had heard of it, many had not. They had no idea who was the prime minister of India, or the president.

And then I asked, “Which do you think is the biggest city in India?” In an instant, a little girl dressed in the regulation uniform common in most village schools, with her hair neatly braided into two plaits, raised her hand. “Satara”, she said, with utmost confidence.