Why Rahul’s speech should remind Big Media of the other India

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on February 3, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/02/03/why-rahuls-speech-should-remind-big-media-of-the-other-india

Rahul Gandhi's speech in Parliament on February 2, in response to the union budget, made it to some front pages﹘Indian Express, Telegraph and Hindustan Times, but not the Hindu or the Mumbai edition of Times of India.

While the Hindu ran it across two columns on page 8, TOI did not report it at all in the edition I checked. It was an important intervention, whether you agreed with what he said or not. Then why bury it, or ignore it altogether?

The newspapers that did report Gandhi's speech picked his key point about there being two Indias, one of the rich and the other of the poor.

This is not even a debatable issue any more given the statistics in the Oxfam report on inequality in India. The top 10 percent of the country control 77 percent of its wealth. And between 2018 and 2022, India has apparently produced 70 new millionaires a day, states the report.

That other India, of the poor, was barely represented in the media as a whole on the days following the economic survey and the budget. Many pages, with colourful graphics and illustrations, were devoted exclusively to reporting and comment on the budget. Typically, the most space was given to the responses from industry and the markets.

How many newspapers sent out reporters to speak to poor people to find out whether the budget means anything to them or not?

In the 1980s, when neither private television channels nor social media existed, print media made it a ritual to get the views of the aam janta on the budget. Of course, quite often this vox populi consisted of a quote from the cigarette and paan vendor outside the respective newspaper office. But at least an effort was made to find out what ordinary people thought.

Today, it is evident that media houses calculate that these voices will not sell their product. So why devote space to them?

On the day the budget was presented, I spoke to two men who can be found on a pavement in one of Mumbai's upmarket localities. Shankar is a cobbler, originally from Satna district in Madhya Pradesh. Srinath sells bananas and is from Allahabad (now Prayagraj) district in Uttar Pradesh. Both men have been around for over two decades. Shankar has a room elsewhere; Srinath sleeps on the pavement next to his stall.

Neither had any idea what I was talking about when I asked them about the budget. Did they know that this happened every year, I asked. No, said both.

I explained briefly what it was about. Srinath, who is always ready with a philosophical comment to any question I ask, said, “What difference does it make to our lives what these politicians say? We are barely surviving.” Shankar echoed these sentiments, adding that in his village, people had no work. He had no option but to continue to sit on that patch of pavement and work as a cobbler.

I know two is not a representative sample. But any conversation, even if it is not for a story, with that other India reminds us that for a vast majority of this country, the hectic and loud discussions on television, or the learned op-eds in print on the annual union budget, mean very little.

What Gandhi said will be debated, and ironically the responses to his speech by ministers and spokespersons of the BJP will be reported at length even if what he said was barely covered. But apart from the slanging matches that have predictably followed Gandhi's speech, surely the media can occasionally turn its eyes towards that other India? Speaking to people like Shankar and Srinath might not make for scintillating copy. But talking to them acknowledges that they exist, that they are as much a part of this country as the experts we quote.

K Sujatha Rao, former union health secretary, in her op-ed in Indian Express on February 2, makes a telling comment that ought to be a cue for a media follow up. She writes, “Inequalities have widened. An estimated Rs 70,000 crores have been spent by the people in this short time for medical treatment that the government ought to have provided.” The period she is referring to is the Covid pandemic. The Oxfam report quoted above reiterates this by pointing out that health care in India is virtually a luxury good, only available if you can pay for it.

Yet, given that health reporting has now become one of the most important beats in the last two years, you have to work hard to find the stories that tell us about the state of public health care. Most often such stories can only be found on independent digital platforms.

Take, for instance, this story by Parth M N on the Pari website. He reports from UP about a community of Musahars, the lowest even amongst scheduled caste communities. His story tells us not just about the lack of adequate health infrastructure, but also about deep prejudice, where a Musahar woman is forced to deliver her child on the pavement outside a hospital because the staff will not admit her.

Another woman tells him how many of them preferred to stay at home when they took ill during the second wave of the pandemic last year rather than go to a hospital. “Who wants to be humiliated when you are already scared of the virus?” she said.

Parth also spoke to Muslims in nearby villages who tell their own stories of discrimination and being compelled to go from one hospital to another to get emergency treatment. As a result, most of them have built up debts due to medical expenditures.

Illustrating Sujatha Rao’s point about the money people have been forced to spend during these pandemic years, Parth writes, “In many of UP’s villages across nine districts, people’s debt grew by 83 percent in the first three months of the pandemic (April to June 2020). The data was gathered through a survey by COLLECT, a collective of grassroots organisations. It recorded that in July-September and October-December 2020, the increase in indebtedness was 87 and 80 percent respectively."

This is the type of granular reporting that is sadly missing from the English print media today, barring an exceptional story. As a result, that other India is vanishing from our consciousness, even though it represents the majority of the citizens of this country.

In the past, election coverage gave journalists an opportunity to understand the real problems that people faced in rural India.

Today, you read endless reports about caste and community calculations and the strengths and weaknesses of various political parties and politicians in the fray. While this has to be reported, do people reading these stories know anything about the region being covered? Do these places have their own histories? What are the sources of livelihood? Is there availability of water? What about public health care facilities? Are they within reach or do most people pay private doctors and fall into debt? And what about environmental issues?

These issues can be integrated into the reporting on elections. They give the reader a picture of parts of India that are otherwise routinely ignored. They come into our line of vision only if there is a major calamity. And, of course, during an election.

Such stories make for much more interesting reading than the routine and predictable. Yet, once again, it is hard to find such reporting in mainstream media. On the other hand, independent digital platforms like Newslaundry, Wire and Scroll are doing this with fewer resources.

While at least some people have appreciated Rahul Gandhi’s reminder of the other India in his speech, it is likely to be forgotten soon. As election day approaches, Big Media is in full form speculating about winners and losers. In the meantime, the Shankars and the Srinaths of this country will still be there, just barely.

Big Media as a public watchdog: No bark, no bite

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on October 28, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/10/28/indian-media-as-a-public-watchdog-no-bark-no-bite

The media in India has much to celebrate this week with the Supreme Court ruling on October 27 in the Pegasus case. Of particular interest to us in the media is what the court has underlined about the importance of the freedom of the press. To quote:

"It is undeniable that surveillance and the knowledge that one is under threat of being spied upon can affect the way an individual decides to exercise his or her rights. Such a scenario might result in self-censorship. This is of particular concern when it relates to the freedom of the press...Such a chilling effect on the freedom of speech is an assault on the vital public-watchdog role of the press, which may undermine the ability of the press to provide accurate and reliable information.”

The key phrase in the quote above is “public-watchdog role of the press”. The question we must ask is how much of the mainstream Indian media truly accepts this as its fundamental role, and how much of it has decided that its primary role is to be a cheerleader for the government or party in power.

Look at the editions of newspapers across languages of October 22. Across the board, in newspapers in many different languages, the lead on the edit page had identical pieces, all written by the same person: India's prime minister.

Narendra Modi was accorded pride of place for an article that spoke of the tremendous achievement of “team India” in crossing the one billion mark of Covid-19 vaccinations. The front pages of all these papers also carried reports on this singular achievement with some embellishing it with their own reportage about the difficulties frontline workers faced in reaching people who needed to be vaccinated. These reports also quoted the prime minister expressing sentiments that were similar to those that appeared in the article purportedly written by him.

What's wrong with that, you might ask? Surely one billion jabs is a great achievement? And if the prime minister of a country sends an article to a newspaper, how can any self-respecting editor refuse?

Except that most newspapers insist that what you send to them for their edit pages has to be exclusive to them. If you are sending out a statement to all media, it is a press release. Normally, that would be used as a part of a report, with relevant quotes from it. But rarely, if ever, have all leading newspapers carried the identical article as their lead on their edit page.

Articles on the edit page are also vetted for accuracy, and mistakes are edited out with the consent of the writer. No such thing was done with this piece. Hence, the prime minister claimed that India was the first country to achieve this milestone. However, that is not true. China hit this target a while back without making a song and dance about it and currently stands at 2.2 billion doses.

The prime minister also claimed that this target had been achieved through "Made in India" vaccines, calling this a paradigm shift. This too is not accurate. Previous vaccination campaigns, such as that of the polio vaccine, were also "Made in India". In the case of the Covid-19 vaccine, the most widely used one was manufactured in India by the Serum Institute of India, but is based on the research done in Oxford University and patented by Astra-Zeneca. The fully Indian-made vaccine, Covaxin by Bharat Biotech, has yet to be cleared by the World Health Organisation.

Perhaps all this is nit-picking, details that should not take away from the glory. Yet, should the mainstream media have added to the hype on that day without questioning why it was necessary given that in terms of the percentage of our population that is fully vaccinated it is only around 30 percent? Was it not obvious that the celebrations were planned to make people forget the ugly reality of the gross mismanagement of the second wave of the pandemic, illustrated by those haunting images of the half buried bodies on the banks of the Ganga?

As Churumuri, the pseudonym used by senior journalist Krishna Prasad, wrote sarcastically on Twitter: "One nation, one edit piece: 453,076 Indians have died due to COVID in the last 19 months; thousands more have been deemed too inconvenient to be counted. The opinion pages of today’s newspapers pay a united tribute to them through a prolific leader-writer."

I asked someone senior in one of the newspapers that I had expected might have held back from following the herd why they did not resist. The answer was two words: "government advertising".

This year, there has been a noticeable increase in government advertising in print media. On any day of the week, newspaper readers are deprived of a traditional front page. Page one is now page three, or even five. The majority of government ads are either of the central government, always with the prime minister's face on them, or from the Uttar Pradesh government bearing large photographs of both the prime minister and UP chief minister Adityanath.

Clearly, this spurt of government advertising is not motivated by lack of coverage of government achievements. Far from it. Most mainstream media uncritically cover statements and occasions marking the "achievements" of most governments. Some years ago, Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi government in New Delhi felt compelled to release ads about the work they had done to upgrade government schools and medical facilities because the media gave them very little coverage.

That is not the case now.

With the downturn in the economy, no newspaper can afford to lose any advertising, leave alone this abundance of government advertising. It follows, then, that even newspapers that have asserted their independence from the government narrative by writing critically, and exposing shortcomings in government policy implementation, would not be in a position to turn down a mass-produced edit page article that lands in the editor's mailbox from the prime minister's office. The possibility of advertising being cut off is not a theoretical construct; it has happened repeatedly as a way for the government to express its disapproval.

A few newspapers did attempt some kind of balancing act by writing mildly critical editorials. The Indian Express also devoted a full page with stories about "the foot soldiers" who ensured that vaccinations reached the areas that are hard to reach. The Hindu ran an edit page article a few days later by Congress president Sonia Gandhi countering some of what Modi had stated in his piece.

However, what was missed out in all the celebratory fluff, even that commending these frontline workers and describing their efforts, was that these stories actually illustrated a more basic situation, one that is ongoing irrespective of the pandemic and that has not been addressed. Millions of Indians still live out of reach of healthcare facilities. If teams can go to such lengths to administer the Covid-19 vaccine, why can't the government ensure that these communities have basic healthcare within their reach at all times?

Within days of the prime minister's multiple op-ed pieces being published, this report appeared in a Mumbai paper, Mid-day, describing the reality facing communities living just 60 km away from India's financial capital. The report describes how a 36-year-old woman from Kayri village in Jawahar taluka of Palghar district in Maharashtra died in the process of being shunted from the primary health centre, to the sub-district hospital and finally to Nashik civil hospital, 150 km away. She was nine months pregnant and she literally bled to death. Vivek Pandit, the chairperson of the tribal development review committee of Maharashtra government, is quoted saying, “At least 5-6 pregnant tribal women have died due to complications related to pregnancy in the past one month."

There is little that is new in this story. It recounts a reality that is known to anyone who cares to follow the real trajectory of India's health care. The dazzle of five-star private hospitals in our cities cannot hide this continuing and ugly reality of poor people who are deprived of their right to basic health care. In the India of 2021, women should not die from a pregnancy-related complication.

Yet so many do. And their stories are rarely told.

These are the stories we in the media should be reporting rather than just echoing a government's celebratory rhetoric. Only then can we call ourselves "a public-watchdog".

Selective amnesia

The Hindu, July 4, 2015

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Reuters

At a mass sterilisation camp.

Forty years is a long period. Since June 20, and the build up to the 40th anniversary of the Emergency, it has been fascinating to watch the politics of selective remembering and determined amnesia. In the former category fall many from the ruling party, barring a few exceptions, who remember their ‘suffering’ during that period and suggest that they were in the forefront of the resistance to the Emergency. The latter are members of the Congress Party, who will not remember even if they have been told, repeatedly, what happened over those 20 months.

What both sides of the political divide forget is that those who really ‘suffered’ during that ‘dark’ period in our history were the poor and the powerless. They were either the targets of Indira Gandhi’s repressive policies, or were foolish enough to try and oppose them. In both instances, there was no recourse to justice.

The silence of the media made this worse. Because the press did not report, there was virtually no record of what happened. Much of it had to be reconstructed after the Emergency. This silence, willing or forced, exacerbated the very real suffering of the people at the receiving end of the government’s policies. Not only were they denied justice but they were also denied a voice. They had been rendered invisible.

Everyone knows now that one of the most atrocious policies of the Indira Gandhi government was the mass sterilisation campaign devised by Sanjay Gandhi as part of his five-point programme. In the name of ‘population control’, poor men and women were rounded up and forcibly sterilised. While the poor were always the principal targets of the government’s population efforts, this time it was specifically poor men. It is now fairly well-established that one of the main reasons for Mrs. Gandhi’s spectacular defeat in the March 1977 elections was the anger among the communities targeted under this campaign.

Was there any rethinking on this policy after 1977? You would think that no political party would risk pushing through a policy that results in such revulsion. Yet, although on paper, population control’ is now ‘family welfare’ and ‘women’s reproductive rights’, in fact sterilisation continues to be the main thrust of government policy. The difference now is that the main target is women, not men. In 2012-13, of the total number of sterilisation cases, 97.4 per cent were women. In fact, since 2005, over 95 per cent of sterilisation procedures have been performed on women.

This government’s stated policy is to encourage sterilisation as a method to control population growth. Incentives for health workers to bring in ‘cases’ for sterilisation have been increased. Women who choose institutionalised delivery are especially targeted; it is so much convenient to coax them into accepting a permanent solution to repeated pregnancies. And most health workers find it easier to persuade or force women than men even though is it well-known that a vasectomy is less complicated, and reversible.

Only a few stories appear about the way these sterilisation camps are conducted. A couple of years back, there was outrage when a story appeared about bicycle pumps being used on 56 women who were sterilised in Banarpal village, 150 km from Bhubaneshwar. The instrument that should have been used is an insufflator that pumps carbon dioxide into the abdomen. As this was not available in the camp where the procedure was being done, a bicycle pump was used. The surgeon in-charge, Dr. Mahesh Prasad Raut, justified this saying: “I am not alone. Surgeons often use bicycle pumps in the rural camps where the facility of an operation theatre and other sophisticated equipment are not available.” This doctor had done 60,000 tubectomies and was awarded by the government for this feat. How many of them were done using bicycle pumps is not known.

And of course, these horrific violations occur not just in Chhattisgarh or Odisha but also in many other places including Faridabad district, Haryana. Neha Dixit, a freelance journalist, has recently written a searing account of what women lined up for a tubectomy faced in the Badshah Khan hospital (http://fountainink.in/?p=7054&all=1). In A Callous Cut, Dixit describes the scene in the hospital where women between the ages of 20-26 await the operation. There are not enough containers to collect urine samples. So only a few women can be tested. They are asked to sign a ‘consent’ form in English, a language they do not understand. And then, dizzy with pain and sedatives, they are sent off to fend for themselves. Little wonder that so many die from sepsis or other complications, or have to be rushed back to hospital.

Reading her account, and looking back on other such stories in the last 40 years, one is forced to ask: Did sterilisation contribute to Indira Gandhi’s defeat only because the target was men? If not, then how come the callous way in which poor women are being sterilised in India in such large numbers is never a political issue?

India’s 'everywoman'

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, June 21, 2015

The Hindu Archives

An old woman lies in a hospital in Mumbai.  No one knows her precise age — perhaps 80, perhaps 90. She was born in a village near Ratnagiri.  Her date of birth was never noted.  So we don’t know.

What we do know is that she was widowed young, has a daughter who survived but who is also a widow.  The two women look after each other.  Their lives have followed an eerily similar pattern. 

 And both have spent their entire lives caring for others.

Years of standing at the kitchen stove, going down on their haunches as they swept and swabbed, picking up heavy buckets of water and doing all the other chores that domestic helps do has meant that both women have developed acute arthritis.  Their joints are stiff and swollen.  Yet they have no choice but to continue to stress these unyielding joints, forcing them to bend a little as they go about their daily tasks.

Although she does not work as a domestic help anymore, the older woman has suffered unbearable joint pains for years.  With age her condition has worsened. She lives in a 15x10ft house in a Mumbai slum.  There is no running water.  It has to be collected when water is released each evening and stored in a drum.  And there is no toilet.  The nearest public toilet is a 15-minute treacherous walk up and down narrow slippery lanes.  For an elderly woman with unmoving limbs that is a mountain she simply cannot climb. The only option is the indignity of open defecation in the drain outside her house.

Sadly, even as she lies inert in her hospital bed, hooked on to an oxygen tank, she is probably better off than she has been for many years.  The women’s ward has six beds; only three are occupied.  It is substantially larger than the room in which she sits, sleeps and eats in her own home. In the hospital, someone washes her, changes her clothes, puts clean sheets on her bed and brings her nutritious food to eat every day. In her own home, her daughter, already frail and still working as a domestic in two households, has to seek the help of neighbours and family members every time she has to help her mother sit up or move a few feet. It is humiliating and frustrating for both.  

Yet, a hospital bed is obviously not a permanent solution.  It is a temporary respite until a diagnosis is presented. And even when that happens, there will be no easy choices about what to do next.  Can a bed-ridden elderly woman, without access to running water and to a toilet, be nursed back to health in a claustrophobic slum dwelling?

I tell this story not only because the woman is someone I know, love and respect; a woman who has cared for me and my family; who has laughed with us, cried with us, scolded us and fought with us.  And who has never said ‘no’ to anything we asked for; who cared for us in a way we can never repay.

This woman is also ‘everywoman’, or rather every poor and elderly woman living in a poor urban settlement anywhere in India. Her condition illustrates the challenge that poverty, illness and age presents to those living in impermanent housing.

An estimated 26 per cent of people living in urban India live below the poverty line.  Yet, this poverty is not just about numbers, about rupees and paise.  It is the poverty of absence — the absence of basic necessities.  It is the poverty that forces families to make the heart-breaking choice of not treating the elderly, of taking them to their villages to die because they cannot afford to treat their ailments in the city.  It is the poverty that exacerbates the indignities that most elderly people suffer, regardless of their economic situation.  It is the poverty of hopelessness that you see reflected in the eyes of this ‘everywoman’.

I realise that these conditions will not change overnight, that many more like this woman will, and indeed do, suffer a fate worse than hers.  But it does strike me as ironical, and vulgar, that we should obsess about building “smart” cities and “global” cities while forgetting that for the largest number of people the solutions are simple and local.  

Affordable housing, so that people like this woman have an option to be cared for at home, should be the topmost priority if we want to build really smart cities.  With such homes will come water and sanitation.  This is not rocket science.  And is surely not beyond the capability of our “smart” urban planners.

Instead, we are deluged with plans to make our cities Internet compliant, with advertisements about dream housing where every desire is fulfilled (at a cost that only a tiny sliver of India’s population can afford) and of health care that means being permanently in debt as the medical industrial machine churns out profits.

A compassionate society is one that cares for the indigent and the elderly.  We are nowhere near the mark.

Link to the original article: https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/indias-everywoman/article7337652.ece