It’s election season and Indian media has put on blinkers. As usual

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on April 1, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/04/01/its-election-season-and-indian-media-has-put-on-blinkers-as-usual

 

In the polarised times in which we live in India, every election has become, literally, a do or die battle. The “Battle of Nandigram” is only one of the many warlike headlines that accost us each day as the long-drawn out process of elections to four state assemblies and one union territory proceeds. But is that the only story in town?

The pandemic has crept back into the headlines with a spurt of fresh coronavirus infections, and the very real worry that India is now facing a second wave. This ought to be headline news. But the media should also be asking why this has happened, how much of it is a failure of policy and how much of the blame lies with the public.

For one, how is it that the government has permitted large gatherings of Hindu pilgrims and the recent Holi celebrations, yet, when asked, officials blame ordinary people for not observing Covid protocols.

And what about the gatherings during the ongoing elections? Visuals clearly indicate that masks aren’t being used as thousands crowd together at rallies and smaller meetings. Has any political party tried to emphasise to its followers the importance of observing these minimum precautions to prevent the spread of the disease? No official, or politician, is willing to admit that there has been a failure of leadership and absence of clear messaging. Instead, we keep hearing them talk about how ordinary people are undisciplined. And the media, unfortunately, is not asking the tough questions that need to be asked at this time.

Apart from elections and the pandemic, what are the stories that need to be told but are barely reported?

We need to tear our eyes away from TV screens and the endless election coverage to think of what is happening in Myanmar, a country with which India has historical ties. The people's resistance to the military regime that took over the country on February 1 has been one of the top stories in the international press. Yet, in India, although stories from international newspapers are routinely reproduced, the democratic struggle now underway in Myanmar – which has already taken many lives – hasn’t found much space in our media.

Myanmar shares a 1,643-km border with India that touches four Northeastern states – Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland, and Arunachal Pradesh. This reality dawned once there were reports that people from Myanmar had crossed into Mizoram, seeking refuge from the daily confrontations between the protesting citizens and the military.

Mizoram’s chief minister, Zoramthanga, has urged the central government to allow the refugees to enter, emphasising the "humanitarian crisis" as well as the shared ancestry with people on the other side.

While Mizoram has taken a sympathetic stance towards the refugees, the Manipur government issued a circular that stated, “People trying to enter/seek refuge should be politely turned away.” Fortunately, the circular has now been withdrawn. Yet in both states, the future of these refugees remains uncertain given that India does not have a refugee policy.

The lack of reporting on this crisis on our borders is emblematic of the neglect of reporting on the Northeast in mainstream media, or "mainland" media, as people in the Northeast call it. The region has remained in the periphery of consciousness in most of India, only springing into the spotlight when there is a natural disaster, an act of insurgency, or an election. Even the latter is covered spottily unless a mainstream Indian political party is central to it. Thus, Assam gets much more coverage than the hill states of the Northeast.

The news that refugees from neighbouring Myanmar were walking across the porous international border into Mizoram would have surprised most readers who are unaware of the history and the geography of much of the Northeast. They would not have known that the border exists on paper but that, in fact, there has been free movement and interaction between people living on either side who are, often, from the same ethnic group.

On market day in the village of Longwa in Nagaland's Mon district, I observed this fluidity as people I spoke to said they had walked across from the other side to shop. The house of the village headman, the Angh, straddles the line that officially divides the two countries. There is a check post at the top of the hill but no one checks. This is a lived reality in just one of several such villages stretching across from Arunachal Pradesh to Nagaland, Manipur, and Mizoram.

The story about the welcome that the government of Mizoram and its people want to extend to the refugees from Myanmar gives us an essential insight into that state. The fact that even this story is being barely reported illustrates the continuing indifference of mainstream media and people in India towards this region. It is this absence of reporting that reinforces ignorance and prejudice, the price for which has been paid by the thousands of Northeasterners who study and work across India but are constantly asked to prove that they are Indian.

As always, there are exceptions to the rule: these stories by Krishn Kaushik who reported from Mizoram, for example. Not only do we learn about the trickle of people crossing over but also the reason Mizos believe they ought to be helped.

The other story is the absence of a gender perspective in reporting, something I pointed out in my last column with reference to the coverage of the migrant exodus of last year. Here I must commend the Indian Express as the only mainstream newspaper that not only did a two-part feature looking at the impact of the pandemic on women's jobs (read here and here), but also reiterated the points in these articles in an editorial. Furthermore, both stories were carried on the front page.

In the digital version of print media, the importance of this isn’t apparent. But traditionally, newspaper editors make a conscious choice each day when they choose the stories they want to place on the front page. These are carried "above the fold" as broadsheet newspapers are folded when they are sold and distributed. An important story is placed just below the masthead of the paper. Both these reports were given that position.

Also, when editors want to emphasise certain stories, they write editorials around them. Although not many people read editorials, they are an indicator of the importance a paper gives to an issue. Hence the significance of an editorial on the gender crisis in the Indian Express.

The gender issue remains relevant in the light of the latest global ranking by the World Economic Forum. India has slipped 28 places in the gender gap and now stands at 140 out of 156 countries surveyed, as this story points out. Its neighbours in South Asia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar, and Bhutan are ranked higher.

There is, of course, a gender angle in election coverage too, and not just because India's only woman chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, is at the centre of the story of the Bengal election. She has had to face many crude remarks made by her opponents that essentialise her being a woman.

Misogyny surfaces constantly during election campaigns, and it has this time too. Some of it is called out; much of it goes by without comment. I leave you with this story by Kavitha Muralidharan about the rampant sexist rhetoric in Tamil Nadu before and during this election. A salutary outcome of sexism being called out is the Election Commission’s decision to bar A Raja of the DMK from campaigning for 48 hours.

 

 

To understand why job quotas for women don't go far enough, take a ride on a Mumbai train

January 22, 2016 in Scroll.in

Employers should recognise that women start working long before they get to the office – and continue when they get home.

 

Kalpana Sharma  · Today · 04:30 pm

Photo Credit: Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters

“Why aren’t India’s women working?” This was the headline of an article in the August 23 edition of The New York Times. The headline writers ought to have known better. Indian women work hard, and all the time. Yet, their work is largely not considered “work”. Only work for which you are paid is counted. And much of the work that women do is unpaid.

The premise that bringing more women into the paid workforce will help women and the Indian economy is behind policies, such as the one announced on Tuesday by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, to reserve 35% of all government jobs for women.
Kumar is not the first to take this step. Madhya Pradesh already has 30% reservation for women in government jobs, as does Gujarat at 33%. In addition, the Union home ministry sent out an advisory to all state government and union territories on August 26, 2014 on increasing women in the police to 33% of the total force.

While 33% of positions in the constable rank are reserved for women in the Central Reserve Police Force and the Central Industrial Security Force, 15% are reserved in the Border Security Force, the Sashastra Seema Bal and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police. As the local police come under the state government, they are expected to fall in line and work towards increasing the number of women recruits – currently in short supply as evidenced by the Delhi Police, a force in which women comprise only 9.27%.

Discouraging factors

But while quotas are well-intentioned, they are clearly not enough. The Parliamentary Committee on Empowerment of Women, which looked specifically at the question of increasing women’s presence in the police force, underlined the simple and rather obvious problems that need to be addressed even as the number of women recruited for these jobs increases.

In its December 17, 2014 report, the committee emphasises the need to improve the facilities available to women when it writes, “despite a spate of efforts from the Government, lack of basic amenities/rest rooms/mobile toilets is still a major problem for the women in police in many States.”
In other words, it is not enough to just recruit more women. Both government and the private sector need to ensure that the conditions at work do not dehumanise women or place an additional stress on their lives. Apart from toilets, provisions of crèches and benefits such as maternity leave should not be seen as special favours. Women enter the paid workforce on unequal terms. A paid job is in addition to the unpaid “work” that they do every day – child care, elderly care, domestic chores, among them.

There will be those who will argue against quotas for women in government jobs. Such people ought to travel by the women’s special trains at peak hour from Churchgate station in Mumbai. Here you meet women, many of them employed by the state government, who wake up at the crack of dawn every day, prepare food for their families, and then set off on their long commute to work.

At the end of the day, they use the train ride to prepare for the tasks that wait exclusively for them once they get home: cook, clean, wash and at some point sleep before the day begins again. Government jobs, with all their security and benefits, are not exactly a gravy ride if you are a lower-middle-class woman.

The other important component to increase women’s presence in the paid workforce is safety. From sexual harassment to sexual assault, women face these dangers every day as they step out to earn a living. The recent distressing case of an Accredited Social Health Activist worker in Uttar Pradesh, who committed suicide because the man who raped her threatened to release the video of the act, brings home the dangers that even those women part of government programmes face. Just having a paid job does not protect them from sexual predators.

A matter of perception

In any case, even if every state government follows the lead of Nitish Kumar and others by reserving government jobs for women, it is unlikely to make more than a tiny dent in the larger problem of getting more women in paid employment. India is close to the bottom in the list of countries when it comes to the percentage of women in paid employment or “female labour force participation” (termed FLFP). While the global average is 50%, which means every other woman is in the labour
force, in India it was 33% in 2012 and has now slipped further.

Why do we need to increase the number of women in paid employment? Is it just tokenism if employment means a double burden on them?

The most obvious significance is that a woman contributing to family income has a better chance of being treated more decently than one who does not. That, of course, is an assumption that is not always born out with the statistics which reveal that even well-educated women in good jobs are at the receiving end of domestic violence. Also, in many cases, they do not have control over the money they earn. Yet, there is change, especially in urban areas where the cost of living is inducing more women into some form of paid employment.

The larger significance of more women in the workforce is that of perception. In the last several decades, women have entered many fields that remained closed to their mothers. Rabia Futtehally, for instance, was one of the first women pilots in India. Today, out of 5,100 commercial pilots in India, 11.7% are women (the average worldwide is 3%). This has been achieved without quotas but illustrates how the opening up of new avenues for employment for women encourages more women to consider these options. And even if entrenched attitudes, which will not accept that women have capabilities and rights, do not evaporate, they are challenged.

Reserving jobs for women is one way to increase the percentage of women in paid jobs. But in the long run, neither more money, nor job security, will make a difference to women’s status unless we recognise and value the real “work” that millions of women do every day, all day.