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.

As we celebrate the Maria Ressas of the world, let's not forget the Raman Kashyaps

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on October 14, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/10/14/as-we-celebrate-the-maria-ressas-of-the-world-lets-not-forget-the-raman-kashyaps

On October 3, Raman Kashyap, a journalist not known outside the place where he worked, was killed. He was covering a farmers' protest in Lakhimpur Kheri. He was one of the eight people killed when a car rammed into the protesters and in the violence that followed.

A week later, on October 8, the Nobel Prize Committee announced the recipients of this year's Peace Prize: two well-known journalists from the Philippines and Russia. Both have been recognised for their courageous journalism in their respective countries. Both have fallen foul of their governments. Both are determined to continue doing what they have been doing for years. As the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee said when announcing the award, they were chosen not just for their courage but also as “representatives of all journalists who stand up for this ideal in a world in which democracy and freedom of the press face increasingly adverse conditions.”

Maria Ressa and Dimitry Muratov's selection for the Nobel Peace Prize has sent out a strong message of encouragement to other journalists like them around the world, but also to governments who continue to deny press freedom that their actions are being noted.

There is much we can learn from the work of both these journalists. Apart from their courage and their persistence in doing what they see as their primary duty as journalists, to be unafraid to investigate and report the wrongdoings of the powerful, their life and work also illustrate the importance of building institutions with people who can make this kind of work possible.

Maria Ressa is one of the founders of the website Rappler that has taken on the Philippines government led by president Eduardo Duterte. Dimitry Muratov established Noyava Gazeta in 1993 and continues to write fearlessly despite living under the regime of Vladimir Putin that permits little by way of press freedom.

But even as we celebrate the Nobel Peace Prize for Ressa and Muratov, let's pause for a moment and think about 35-year-old Raman Kashyap. He was a freelance journalist who sent reports to a local TV channel, Sadhna TV. According to Wikipedia, Sadhna TV is "an Indian spiritual television network owned and operated by Sadhna Group. It was launched on 18 April 2003."

Kashyap had joined the channel just two months ago according to his family. His other job was as a schoolteacher. He was married with two children aged 11 and three. He earned around Rs 500 for every story he filed, if it was used.

There are thousands of Raman Kashyaps who are a part of the media scene in India. But they are hardly ever recognised or even acknowledged. Kashyap has gained more fame in his death than he ever would have had he lived and continued to work as a district journalist.

In fact, his death throws a light on this army of underpaid and even unpaid news-gatherers that are so vital to the news business.

Sevanti Ninan, in her seminal book Headlines from the Heartland (Sage, 2007) recorded the growth of this hidden army of news-gatherers. They are not even designated as journalists. Most of them are not trained. And many do other jobs and fill in as journalists, or stringers, when required.

This process of localisation of news, which began in the mid-1980s, really took off in the 1990s. By then private television channels had entered the media scene. They swept up a large chunk of advertising that would have gone to print media.

This is when regional newspapers, starting with Eenadu in Andhra Pradesh followed by big Hindi newspapers like Dainik Jagran, Dainik Bhaskar and Hindustan, began the process of localisation. Beginning with introducing pages that accommodated district news, they even went on to have district editions. The aim was to sweep up local advertising as well as readership. This was a strategy to leverage their reach into semi-urban and rural areas with the big consumer products companies that wanted to reach these markets.

The formula worked as was evident in the growing circulation of these papers. But alongside, this also spawned a new breed of journalist. These men were tasked not just to report, but also to bring in advertising. Payment was by way of commission based on the amount of advertising they brought in. The reporting was mostly unpaid. But the person got a visiting card that identified him as a representative of a media group. That was currency in these rural settings; it gave the person status and some legitimacy.

According to Ninan, "Without exception every localisation drive in India's Hindi heartland was riding on the willing backs of a host of largely unpaid stringers, filing quantities of miscellaneous news from their immediate neighbourhood." (page 116) She notes that newspapers like Dainik Jagran or Hindustan would have, at any time, from 200 to 1000 stringers in a state. Ninan's book is replete with many fascinating details about the localisation of news and is worth revisiting as we think of journalists like Kashyap.

Only around 2005 did these newspapers introduce some form of gate keeping, by authenticating the information coming in from their stringers. Given the caste and political hierarchies that operate in a rural setting, how would one know for sure that the information was legitimate? An important step taken was to relieve stringers of the task of collecting advertising, thus removing the very real possibility of conflict of interest.

The process of newsgathering by part-time journalists that began with newspapers continued with television channels, especially the smaller ones. And now, with the advent of the internet and social media, anyone with a smartphone can become a journalist. To have eyes and ears on the ground with minimal additional investment is something that most media houses would welcome. And that is what they do.

But when one such journalist lands in trouble, or is injured, or even killed, there is no one who comes to his or her aid. As Jitendra Singh, another local journalist from Lakhimpur Kheri tells Shivangi Saxena in this short video posted by Newslaundry on Twitter, no one cares. Even the events of Lakhimpur Kheri would have passed without creating such a stir had the video showing the men being mowed down, shot by a local journalist, not surfaced within a couple of days. It was delayed, as Singh points out, because the internet was shut down and those who had footage could not share it until a couple of days later. He says, "Big Media came after the violence. There wouldn't have been any proof of the violence had we not been there."

That visual proof that these local, poorly paid journalists provide has proven repeatedly to be the essential building block of a larger story. The most recent of these is Lakhimpur Kheri but there are many like this from the past. The reach of Big Media, as Jitendra Singh calls it, would be greatly reduced if these men were not feeding the news machine.

From the perspective of the big media houses, there is always the question of credibility and authenticity of the reports that come, by way of district stringers. But there are ways to double check. The inputs from these stringers provide a lead, much as news agencies with reporters in more places than even the largest newspaper chain have always done. This is what media houses need to acknowledge and back grassroots news-gatherers, many of whom take considerable risks while doing their jobs.