Words and their meanings

The Hoot (http://www.thehoot.org)

The language used to describe those who protest in Kashmir is not just a matter of semantics. It is important because it places what is happening within a context, says KALPANA SHARMA.

Posted Thursday, Jul 08 20:22:51, 2010
SECOND TAKE
KALPANA SHARMA

It is interesting how in the current standoff in Kashmir, with curfew imposed in Srinagar and even journalists not being allowed free movement, the phrases used to describe those confronting the security forces are consistently careful in most of the English language print media outside Kashmir. The angry young men of Srinagar, Baramulla, Anantnag and Sopore are being called “stone-pelters” or “stone-throwers” or just the generic term “protestors”. Although some reports hint that some of them might be paid to provoke the police and the CRPF, nowhere is the word terrorists, or even separatists, used to describe those participating in street battles in Kashmir, notwithstanding their battle cry of “aazadi”.

Is this because the bulk of the reporting, as the situation developed in the last month or so, is by Kashmir-based reporters who have followed the story, and the process leading to the protests, rather than by parachute journalists from Delhi or elsewhere who land up when there is a high drama?

Speak to journalists in Kashmir and you will find that many are extremely sensitive about the terminology that so much of mainstream Indian media uses without pausing to think about the meaning. In fact, on a news programme on NDTV on July 7, the day curfew was imposed on Srinagar, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, the “moderate” Hurriyat leader, took the Indian media to task for calling the young men on the streets “hooligans” and “trouble-makers” without understanding why they have taken to the streets.

Another example is the generally accepted view that the higher turnout in the last elections in Jammu and Kashmir, as well as the increase in tourism, adds up to a return to “normalcy”. Or that ordinary Kashmiris are now willing to settle for better governance, basic facilities and a “peaceful” life rather than demanding “aazadi”. Many journalists accept this conclusion without question. Thus, through the summer, when tourists from all over India flock to the beautiful valley, you will find articles about “normalcy” in Srinagar and elsewhere.

Yet, when the street battles escalated, particularly in the course of the last month, many readers in other parts of India must have wondered why? Were these young men provoked, paid to throw stones? Or were they nursing grievances for months and years that finally came to a boil with the increase in civilian deaths and the lack of response from New Delhi on the demand for the removal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act? Is it possible that the media did not probe deeply enough to assess the mood of these young people in the beginning, or to understand how widespread was the feeling of disillusionment and disappointment in the valley? Could it be that journalists from outside Kashmir underestimated the power of a Shopian or the fake encounter of three young men in Machil and presumed that a surface “calm” meant that things were indeed “normal'? Could it be that journalists have been seduced by the language and phrases used by the authorities in relation to Kashmir and as a result overlooked the gaping wound of unresolved political questions that remains open?

I would suggest that the surface changes have not touched the deeper disappointment and disillusionment in Kashmir about the long-term future of the region. Thus, it is not “peace” that ordinary people want; they stress they want a “resolution” to the Kashmir question. They want development and jobs, yes, but they also want a political solution. These are not mutually exclusive. And for us in the media to believe that participating in elections settles open and unresolved political issues like Kashmir is naïve at best and foolish at worst.

The language used to describe those who protest in Kashmir is not just a matter of semantics. It is important because it places what is happening within a context. Thus, what is significant is not that people are using stones instead of guns, as some reports suggest, but that young people are daring men with guns, even at risk to their lives, because their anger and frustration cannot be contained any more. We need to comprehend this anger that fuels the “stone-pelter”.

Writing in the context of the Middle East, veteran journalist Robert Fisk, who has covered the region for over three decades, talks about language and semantics in his column in The Independent. He discusses the use of phrases like “spike in violence” when what is actually meant is an increase in violence, about the unthinking repetition of phrases like the “road map to peace” or getting it “back on track” or even the tautology “deadly massacre” when all massacres are necessarily “deadly”. Many of these phrases emanate from official briefings and become part of the lexicon of journalists. Fisk questions this unthinking adoption of terminology and what it represents. He writes:

“Power and the media are not just about cozy relationships between journalists and political leaders, between editors and presidents. They are not just about the parasitic-osmotic relationship between supposedly honourable reporters and the nexus of power that runs between White House and State Department and Pentagon, between Downing Street and the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence, between America and Israel.

In the Western context, power and the media is about words ??" and the use of words. It is about semantics. It is about the employment of phrases and their origins. And it is about the misuse of history, and about our ignorance of history. More and more today, we journalists have become prisoners of the language of power. Is this because we no longer care about linguistics or semantics? Is this because laptops ‘correct' our spelling, ‘trim' our grammar so that our sentences so often turn out to be identical to those of our rulers? Is this why newspaper editorials today often sound like political speeches?”

The context of Fisk's comments might be different, but the point he makes is apt for Indian journalists, whether we cover Kashmir, the Northeast, or the so-called “Naxal-infested areas” in India.

(To read the original, click on the link above)

Mothers and sons

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, June 27, 2010

The Other Half

Mothers and sons

If you happen to be the mother of a teenage boy in Srinagar, your anxiety levels will have hit the roof. Since the beginning of this year, seven young men, the youngest being 13-year-old Wamiq Farooq, have been killed on the streets of Srinagar. The city is literally seething, on the boil, with not a week passing when some incident brings all life to a standstill.

For mothers, the trauma is particularly poignant. Tufail Mattoo, the 17-year-old killed ostensibly by a tear gas shell, although that theory is being contested, was an only son. He was reportedly on his way to tuitions. His mother, who was busy cooking on that day, had never imagined that something like this could happen to him. She realised that something had happened when she saw the crowd outside her house.

Tufail’s mother is inconsolable. Other mothers wonder how to keep their young boys off the roads. One woman, mother of a 14-year-old, told me that she and four other women have pooled their resources to ensure that their children get driven right up to the school gate, are escorted in, and collected from school. Although her son longs to join young boys playing football in a field across from her house, she dare not let him go. So he spends his time in front of a computer or the television or reading or playing in their garden. She says that when he heard the news of Tufail’s death, he burst into a rage, kicked the furniture in the house and screamed at his mother, asking her to let him take a gun and shoot all those responsible for what had happened. How many more such young boys sit locked up in their homes? How many are joining the ranks of the defiant young men who mock and dare the security forces and pelt stones?

The woman quoted above is a professional and leads a comfortable life. Yet the fallout of the Kashmir conflict spares no one, not even people like her. Thus while Tufail’s mother mourns the loss of her only son, other mothers spend their nights dreading the next day and wondering if their children will return home safe from school. Suddenly, conflict is not about “militants” or “insurgency” but the safety of day-to-day existence.

Even a couple of days in Srinagar reminds you that the story of that city, that conflict, that beautiful region, is never fully told in the “breaking news” reports about stone-throwing, deaths and strikes. You can smell the anger, you can taste the disappointment, you can see the disillusionment with talk of “peace” all around you even as on the surface the streets of some parts of the city are crawling with Indian tourists happily escaping the stifling heat of the plains and providing good business to the locals.

At the other end of India, far away from Kashmir and its unending problems, lies the state of Manipur, beautiful and remote. For over 60 days, as we are finally being informed by a media that in the past ignored this region, there has been an economic blockade that has prevented the flow of goods into the state.

This translates itself into unimaginable hardships for people who have learnt to live with a higher degree of daily crises compared to people in most parts of this country. On a good day, in the capital Imphal, people feel lucky if they get electricity for four hours. Like their counterparts in Srinagar, they live with the reality of unexpected hartals and strikes where everything closes down. They have known the struggle to survive and keep their lives running even when there are long spells of dusk-to-dawn curfew. Somehow, people work around all these hurdles and get on with their daily lives. Children go to school – although they miss days on end when there is a disruption. People go to work in government offices and banks, run businesses, big and small, and report for the local and national media. The difficulties journalists face each day with the absence of basic infrastructure are compounded by the insecurity of dealing with literally dozens of militants groups who think nothing of gunning down a journalist they think does not toe their line. This is a “normal” situation.

But the last two months have gone way beyond this “normal” situation. It will take months before things actually become normal. We read news about trucks finally entering Manipur. What we do not read, in any kind of detail, is how ordinary people survived these 60 days, how mothers who delivered babies during this period are doing without essentials, how the elderly are managing without medicines, what people are eating, what is the fuel they have used to cook in the absence of cooking gas – which in any case is always in short supply. “Normal” is a situation they will not experience for a long time to come.

Sometimes people think you are drawing too many far-fetched and even irrelevant conclusions if you try to focus on women in such situations. But it is an angle that is unavoidable in both Kashmir and Manipur. Women are at the centre of it – the mothers of the boys killed, the mothers of the boys who are getting bolder as they hurl stones at the security forces and the mothers of the boys who are now being kept at home for fear they might join the others. Similarly in Manipur, it is the mothers on both sides of the ethnic divide who have watched their children become militants, get killed, get disillusioned with the political system, get killed even if they are uninvolved, stand up and fight for peace and a resolution, and get killed for daring to be different.

So while men decide when to talk and when to fight, when to provoke violence and when to be conciliatory, when to stick to a cause and when to consider other viewpoints, thousands of women, and their young children, live out the reality of conflicts without any end in sight.

Manipur, once more

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, August 23, 2009

THE OTHER HALF


Manipuri women staging a protest in Delhi (photo: Sandeep Saxena, courtesy The Hindu)



While the rest of India celebrated its 62nd year as an independent country, in its northeast corner there was little to celebrate. On July 23, “an ordinary day” in the Manipur capital, Imphal — if indeed there is such a thing as an “ordinary day” — Rabina Devi, a pregnant woman, was going to the market when she was shot dead as the police chased a young man. At the same time, a “suspected militant” was pushed into a pharmacy and shot. The police claimed he had shot at them. But the fake “encounter” killing was captured by a photographer (who is petrified of being discovered) and leaked to the magazine Tehelka. The 12 pictures are a damning indictment as they clearly show an unarmed Chongkham Sanjit being pushed into the pharmacy and then being brought out dead and loaded onto a truck. All this happened in a crowded market place in broad daylight (at 10.30 a.m.).

Anger on the streets

The Tehelka expose has led to an explosion of anger on the streets of Imphal. Women, men, young people are out on the streets, agitating, demanding justice and an end to the impunity granted security forces under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). This demand is not new. It surfaces every now and then but refuses to die out. It requires only one incident for the anger to spill out on the streets. The State’s response to such agitations is also not new. Dusk to dawn curfew, tear gas used against agitators, a show of force. In turn, people respond by calling bandhs, defying curfew and courting arrest. And so the cycle of violence continues.

This time, the problem is not limited to the Imphal valley, inhabited by the majority Meitei. Even in the hills where the Tanghkul Nagas live there have been bandhs and protests over the killing of two “suspected militants” on August 12. Manipur, according to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s address at the recent meeting of Chief Ministers in New Delhi, accounts for a third of all violent incidents in India’s Northeast.

Amazing resilience

What always continues to amaze the outsider looking in to Manipur is the mobilisation of women and their fearlessness. Amateur videos on You Tube show scores of women on the streets, throwing down the gauntlet literally (they spread the cloth they wear as the upper garment as a sign of defiance as no one is supposed to trample on these) and facing a phalanx of police personnel armed with rifles and tear gas shells. The women from Imphal’s remarkable all-women market, the Ema Keithel, have been courting arrest in droves as their mark of protest. The women are calling this another “Nupila” (women’s war), reminiscent of the struggle against the British.

“We women cannot bear anymore as it has reached beyond a tolerable limit. That’s why we have come out unitedly to get ourselves killed or get arrested by the police”, Chaoba Devi, one of the women leading the agitation, told the press. Women talk about how curfew has disrupted education and the livelihood of thousands who depend on daily wages. A visit to Manipur earlier this year showed us the challenge of living under dusk to dawn curfew — and the burden women have to bear to ensure that their children are fed, that there is enough water, and that they can reach a healthcare facility if someone falls ill.

(To read the rest click on the link above)