Burning Manipur, silence in media: Northeast bias or self-censorship?

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on November 21, 2024

Another election cycle is behind us, almost. As I write this, the election results for the assembly polls in Maharashtra and Jharkhand are awaited.

But even as the results in one of the most confusing elections for voters in Maharashtra – with fractured regional parties and rebels and independents adding to the craziness – will dominate the news, I want to focus in this column on news that ought to dominate but does not.

More specifically, Manipur, which is burning – a fire that barely subsided for the last 18 months. Yet you wouldn’t know that if you were a reader of India’s mainstream newspapers.

Sporadic coverage. That’s the most generous phrase that can be used to define the coverage of the relentless ethnic conflict in Manipur since May last year. Predictably, when the security forces are involved, the story makes it to the front page and gains some prominence. When ordinary people are being killed in the internecine warfare between different armed groups in the state, the story, if reported at all, will be buried on an inside page.

As a result, people who still rely on newspapers as their main source of information would not be able to explain what lies behind the violence, despite the occasional “explainers”.  Manipur is relegated to the spot of the “troubled” northeast, where India must send “security forces” to sort things out. That decades of this strategy have achieved precisely nothing is, of course, not understood to a readership fed on morsels from that region.

There are exceptions to this rule, and every now and then one is surprised by a detailed report in one of our national newspapers where the reporter has visited the state. But these are too few and far in between, given the extent and the extended period over which Manipur has been literally on fire. 

As always, the independent digital platforms do much better.

There are challenges, of course, for all journalists covering a conflict zone. Which version of an incident do you report? Do you try to get all sides, or do you take the easier path of relying on “official” sources? This is virtually the norm. As a result, in a state so divided, the “mainland” media is viewed as being one-sided by the minorities, the hill tribes like the Kuki, and sometimes also by the Meitei.  

Journalists based in Manipur also get divided on ethnic lines. Those of us based outside the state might find this difficult to understand, but in small, ethnically divided societies, it is a challenge for journalists based there to do the balancing act. The ethnic filter is applied to all news and information. Its credibility is always questioned depending on the source and the antecedents of that source.

An example is two recent incidents that occurred in Jiribam district that borders Assam. 

Since November 7, Manipur has drawn some attention, at least in the print media.  On that day, in one of the more peaceful parts of the state, a 31-year-old Hmar tribal woman, a school teacher, was tortured and burned to death allegedly by members of the Meitei militant group, Arambai Tenggol. She is survived by her husband, a farmer, and three small children.

The retaliation was swift from the other side as a Meitei relief camp was attacked by suspected Hmar “extremists”, the term often used by the media. Six women and children were abducted. Their bodies were later found in a river nearby. According to the Hmar, these men were armed “village volunteers”.  

Ten of the Hmar attackers were killed by the CRPF stationed near the camp. 

This story is but one of many examples of the complex and layered reality of Manipur today. Whose version do you believe and report? Even giving both sides of the story does not necessarily provide a clear picture of what happened and why, but it is better than giving just one side.

For instance, Sukrita Baruah of Indian Express did attempt this in her front page follow-up story after November 11. It is heartbreaking to listen to the husband of the woman who was killed on November 7 and the loss of hope of a peaceful future.

However, it is Rokibuz Zaman of Scroll who provides us with the granular details and the context behind the killing. An obvious question is: why did the Meitei group Arambai Tenggol target the Hmar woman? A senior police official tells Zaman that the group wanted to send a message and “disrupt the peace” through what he called an “unprovoked” killing. You will not find this kind of detail in the few newspaper reports that have appeared on both incidents. 

A related question we must ask is whether mainstream or “mainland” media’s indifference to Manipur has played some part in the centre and the state government not feeling any pressure to act. In fact, it is only after these recent incidents in November that at least one newspaper, Indian Express, made a strong case for Manipur chief minister N Biren Singh’s dismissal. In its concluding paragraph, the editorial states:

“It is urgent that the trust deficit that has widened over the last one and a half years or so is addressed. But first of all, the Centre must remove the chief minister who has presided over the spreading and deepening conflict in his state. The Centre must ask Biren Singh to go — a decision it should have taken long ago. The time for excuses is running out.”

In fact, the time for excuses ran out a long time ago. And of course, given a tone-deaf government at the centre, which rarely heeds any opinion contrary to the dominant narrative in the media, such editorials, even if they come late in the day, are unlikely to be heeded. 

However, we must still question why the media has been so quiet and not stated the obvious, as the Indian Express has done now. If another state, not ruled by the BJP, had faced this kind of violence over an extended period, would the media have remained quiet? Would there not have been demands for dismissing the government and for central intervention? 

The absence of outrage underlines a couple of realities. One, that even the few newspapers that are occasionally critical of the Modi government continue to tread carefully on issues like Manipur. And second, that the very location of Manipur in India’s northeastern corner brings home the reality that people in the region have complained about for decades: that the tragedies that play out there do not arouse the “mainland”, including its media.  

 

Trump’s return: The threat to US press freedom runs parallel to India’s media crisis

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on November 8, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/11/08/trumps-return-the-threat-to-us-press-freedom-runs-parallel-to-indias-media-crisis 

The US presidential elections are done and dusted. We in India can now go back to our own election season, with the impending elections in Maharashtra and Jharkhand at the end of this month.

Yet, one must admit that the world’s attention, including that of many in India, was drawn to the US elections. Not just because, as Americans love to remind us, it is the oldest democracy in the world, but because of the nature of the contest and the contestants. One has a controversial and colourful personality who has drawn attention to himself even when he was out of office for the last four years, and the other is a woman of colour, who had to step in at short notice and literally introduce herself to the American electorate.

In the end, the majority of Americans decided to go with the candidate they knew, Donald Trump. And they rejected the chance of making history by electing a woman, and that too a woman of colour, to the highest office. 

Entertaining and distressing as was the high-octane election campaign leading up to November 5, in the end it is not just the defeated Democrats who are introspecting about the reasons for their loss. The media too is beginning to ask how they missed the shift in American politics, where groups who were expected to vote one way voted another.

In India, we are familiar with this debate after the general elections this year, when the results threw up surprises, especially in states like Uttar Pradesh, where it was assumed that the BJP would do well, if not better than in 2019. That did not happen. And one reason was the underreporting of the extent of disillusionment amongst the large number of unemployed in a state where the government boasted about economic progress. 

In the US too, early analysis indicates that inflation and rising costs played a big part in voter choice and that even people who had earlier voted for Democrats switched this time.

Another interesting observation by commentators on various US television channels, relevant for us in India, is that the assumption that the “Latino vote” or the “Black vote” are monoliths and these communities vote in a particular way was wrong. It is evident that within these constituencies there is considerable layering and that voters make choices that are not necessarily based on their ethnicities. And the proof of that is the broad spectrum of support that Trump got in these elections, defying the usual calculations.

The Indian media too has been realising, especially in the last decade, that generalisations like the “Dalit vote” or the “Muslim vote” are irrelevant now. Caste, religion, gender, ethnicity, region – all these categories are now layered with many other factors, such as economic distress, for instance. 

The discussion in the US has now moved to how Trump will deal with his political opponents, having spoken openly of retribution during the campaign, whether his foreign policy will reflect his first term, and if his administration will deport illegal immigrants within his first 100 days in office, as he promised. Also, will his attitude towards mainstream media, which he has disparaged in no uncertain terms, be the same as in his first term. 

About the media, many dire predictions have already been made. Jon Allsop of the Columbia Journalism Review suggests that “Trump’s impending second term poses a credible and unprecedented threat to press freedom as America has known it”. Is this an exaggeration, an overreading of the president elect’s attitude toward the media? A day before the elections, in his last election rally, Trump referred to the media as the “enemy camp”. 

Most people in India might have forgotten Trump’s approach to the mainstream US media when he was elected in 2016. 

This paragraph, from an article by Kyle Paoletta in CJR sums it up: 

“Since he entered politics, a decade ago, Donald Trump has castigated journalists for their skepticism and independence, calling the media ‘the enemy of the people,’ a ‘threat to democracy,’ ‘fake,’ and ‘crooked bastards’ whom he vows to prosecute. Now that he has secured a second term, he will be free to make good on his promises. Already, during his first term, the Department of Justice conducted surveillance of reporters and charged Julian Assange with espionage; regulators seemingly sought to block a merger of AT&T and Time Warner as retribution for critical coverage by CNN; the White House arbitrarily denied access to veteran journalists. All of that fostered an environment of media suppression, leading to more than six hundred physical attacks on journalists nationwide in 2020 alone. Trump has welcomed the violence. ‘To get to me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news,’ he told a crowd in Pennsylvania this week. ‘I don’t mind that so much’.”

Some of this will sound familiar to those of us in the media in India – who have faced similar hostility, even if not openly articulated, for being critical of the BJP and especially Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

But what Paoletta goes on to write about the US media during Trump’s first term is even more reflective of what we have seen here. He writes:

“Perhaps the least palpable consequence of Trump’s return to the White House will be the most widespread: journalists self-censoring or otherwise altering their coverage. That phenomenon, which Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale, has called ‘anticipatory obedience,’ is a feature of societies with repressive governments. With Trump returning to office, it is hard not to count ours among them.”

“Anticipatory obedience.” Such an appropriate phrase for what we have witnessed in the mainstream Indian media in the last decade. Although here we also have “voluntary obsequiousness” in our media, especially in television channels.

There is another aspect of Trump’s attitude towards the US media that has some parallels here. In his first term, Trump was willing to engage with the mainstream media and appeared on various talk shows, although his preferred choice was always Fox News, the Murdoch-owned cable channel that was openly supportive.  During this election campaign, barring the two debates, one with President Biden and the other with Vice President Kamala Harris, he has kept away from mainstream TV.  

Instead, one gathers that on the advice of people like his 18-year-old son, he chose to appear on popular podcasts, such as the one by Joe Rogan, which was viewed by millions of people. An article in the New York Times on Trump and the media points out that this strategy gave Trump a way to “sidestep more confrontational interviews with professional journalists, where he might face tough questions, fact-checks and detailed policy debates. The influencers he met with rarely challenged Mr Trump, and often lavished him with praise.” 

This sounds familiar if you look at Modi’s record with the Indian media. To date, he has not held a single press conference or given an unscripted interview to any mainstream media, television channel, or newspaper. Instead, his preferred channel of communication to the electorate was radio, through the monthly broadcast “Mann ki Baat” and his party’s deft use of social media to spread his message. Mainstream media played its role by accepting scripted interviews and reporting without fact-checks and uncritically, anything Modi said publicly. Not a single other politician has managed to get that spread and reach through the media.  

If there is one aspect that stands out as different between the mainstream US media and India, it is the issue of official endorsement. In the US, major newspapers have historically endorsed one or the other presidential candidate. Such endorsement appears in the form of an editorial. It is argued that the editorial stance of a newspaper does not reflect or affect its news coverage. That is debatable, but this is how leading newspapers like the New York Times justify endorsing a candidate.

In India, there is no such tradition. Yet, even if our most widely read newspapers play a balancing game, the bias comes through. Perhaps not openly, but anyone who understands how the print media works would know that the importance given to some news, the placement of news, or the absence of some news indicates a newspaper’s political leanings without stating it in so many words.  

To argue that the Indian press does not lean one way or another when it comes to political parties is nothing short of hypocritical. When the Washington Post decided this year not to endorse either of the presidential candidates, there was a considerable stir in the US and some minor ripples here. The only Indian newspaper to respond was the Times of India in an op-ed written by the “Editorial Team”. 

I quote below one of the more extraordinary paragraphs from the piece:

“TOl’s principle of neutrality is rooted in a long tradition of Indian philosophical thought – be cognizant of all ideas and perspectives, don’t tie your identity to any one of them. To hold on to, to endorse, an ideology championed by anyone is the equivalent of intellectual baggage. In Indian philosophy, the same holds, even more so, when it comes to heroes. Picking and sticking to a hero or a role model is essentially an act of intellectual self-harm. It closes your mind.”

How wonderful it would be if the Indian media followed this! 

No guarantee of protection or change: What the stories of 3 journalists tell us this month

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on October 17, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/10/17/no-guarantee-of-protection-or-change-what-the-stories-of-3-journalists-tell-us-this-month

Journalism and journalists have made news this last fortnight.

The recognition by the Supreme Court of the work done by a journalist in exposing the way caste operates within our prison system is significant for several reasons. It underlines the importance of this kind of deep-dive socially relevant journalism, it illustrates the process that journalists must follow to ensure that their revelations make a difference, and it reminds us that unfortunately, ultimately one must often turn to the highest court even though the matter could have been settled outside the judicial system.

Sukanya Shantha wrote a revelatory article for The Wire in December 2020 that exposed how caste-based discrimination in allocation of work in Indian prisons is endorsed by official prison manuals. Shantha spoke to former prisoners and examined whether the problem was restricted to a few states. She found that it was virtually universal, in that all states in India followed this norm. Prisoners from marginalised castes were given work like sweeping, cleaning toilets and even sewers while the more privileged castes were assigned duties as cooks or in the office.  

The court ruled this unconstitutional and directed that it be removed from prison manuals. It also ruled that the caste of prisoners should not be recorded when they begin their incarceration, something that the petitioner had not asked for. It remains to be seen whether the spirit of the judgment will be followed in prisons or if jail authorities will find ways around it.

But to come back to the journalistic work of Shantha, her investigative story is the kind that requires time, work and investment. She was able to devote seven months to the story with the support of funding from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. The platform for which she writes, The Wire, would not have had the funds to support such journalism. 

However, well-endowed media houses do have the money to invest in such reporting but do not bother in the current mediascape that prevails in India. They hesitate either because they are playing a balancing game to ensure that the government stays off their backs, or for crass commercial reasons where there’s place only for news that sells their product. The conditions of poor, marginalised caste prisoners are obviously not a selling proposition.

Shantha’s story did not go entirely unnoticed. Within a few months of it appearing, the Jodhpur bench of the Rajasthan High Court took suo motucognisance of it and asked the state government to make the changes in its jail manual. A couple of other states, such as Goa, also did this quietly.  

While Shantha had hoped that some of the groups concerned with prison reforms might follow up by taking the matter to court, this did not happen. 

That is when she decided, in December last year, to file a petition in the Supreme Court. Fortunately for her, she had lawyers willing to fight the case pro bono. 

What this case, and the Supreme Court’s ruling illustrates is that doing a well-researched explosive investigative piece for an independent platform is not enough to lead to policy change. Perhaps, if one of the national newspapers had published her story, there would have been a quicker response. But that too is not guaranteed given the tone-deaf attitude of most governments to media reports on social and human rights issues, particularly when they touch on caste. 

In the 1980s, in the post Emergency period when the Indian media woke up to human rights issues, some of the journalists who broke these stories also followed up by petitioning the Supreme Court. For instance, in 1984, well-known journalist Neerja Chowdhury filed a case against the Madhya Pradesh government based on a series she did on bonded labour. 

While Sukanya Shantha is in the news for exposing caste-based discrimination in Indian prisons, another journalist was fleetingly in the news for something more superficial. Abhishek Upadhyay reports from Uttar Pradesh. An FIR was lodged against him by another journalist, Pankaj Kumar, for a post by Upadhyay on social media platform X alleging that the state government favoured people from a particular caste. 

On the surface, this seems a petty matter. But Upadhyay had to turn to the Supreme Court for relief. In its October 4 interim ruling (the case is still being heard), the court stated: 

“In democratic nations, freedom to express one’s views are respected… The rights of the journalists are protected under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India. Merely because writings of a journalist are perceived as criticism of the government, criminal cases should not be slapped against the writer.”

This appears like stating the obvious. Yet, the very fact that the highest court in India has to reiterate this illustrates the constant hazards journalists face if they choose to criticise the powerful, even casually.  Even if nothing comes of such cases, the process itself is the punishment. The only way to escape this is to keep quiet, and not stir the waters. 

The third journalist in the news is senior assistant editor and Gujarat correspondent of The Hindu, based in Ahmedabad, Mahesh Langa. On October 8, he was remanded to 10 days in police custody for alleged involvement in a GST scam. Langa is a well-respected journalist who has filed stories on Gujarat that have exposed the hollowness of some of the state government’s claims. While this case is still unravelling, it was notable that Langa was picked up even though his name is not mentioned in the FIR. While several journalists organisations issued a statement saying that his 10-day remand was “judicial overreach”, his own paper was more cautious in its response. 

The reason for concern in Langa’s case is obvious. Given the past record of the BJP-led central government and its counterpart in Gujarat, journalists can be charged with crimes that have nothing to do with their work but can tie them down to a point that they cannot continue to work. 

What these three disparate stories tell us about the status of journalists in the media today is that you have to be persistent and committed to ensure that your exposés lead to change, that even casual criticism of the government in some states, like UP, can lead to legal tangles, and that even if you work for a leading national newspaper, you are not protected from the State if it wants to send a message.

A noisy Indian media ought not to distract us from the reality that journalists trying to do real journalism face every day. Their freedom to report without fear or favour extends only to the boundaries set by those in power. 

I end with a quote that relates to another country, the United States, but could well apply to us here.

In a newsletter sent out to subscribers of New York Times, investigative reporter Michael Schmidt quotes Ian Bassin, executive director of a nonprofit group called Protect Democracy. In the context of the attitude of former President Donald Trump, and currently a candidate in the upcoming presidential elections, towards his opponents, Bassin told Schmidt: “The very definition of freedom is to be able to do those things without retribution or even just fear of retribution by the government…Once the government has made clear it can and will attempt to use the awesome power of the state to seek to punish you based on who you are, what you think, how you’ve exercised your rights or whether you’ve shown sufficient fealty to the leader, you are no longer truly free.” 

From Gaza to Dhaka: Missing Indian lens in global reportage

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on October 4, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/10/04/from-gaza-to-dhaka-missing-indian-lens-in-global-reportage

October 7 marks one year since the attack on Israel by Hamas and the ongoing war on Gaza. Thousands of Palestinians, including children, have been killed in this past year, and much of Gaza has been reduced to a pile of rubble. Meanwhile, many of the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas after its attack remain in captivity.

The world has watched this war through the media’s coverage. The heart of the conflict zone, that is Gaza, has been inaccessible to most journalists except those based there. We have seen their reports even as they came under fire. Their reports, often circulated through social media, gave us an unfiltered view of the devastation. And we know of the many who died while reporting or were targeted by the Israelis even when they were off duty. 

Since October last year, much has been written and analysed about the coverage of this conflict by Western media, including the words used to describe the devastation. For instance, when leading newspapers like the New York Times report that X number of people “died” in Gaza, the use of that word hides the ugly reality that these people, including small children, were “killed” by Israeli bombardment on civilian areas. They did not just die. 

Pointing this out is not nitpicking. It is essential to understand how what appears as factual, unbiased reporting can colour the understanding of the reader or viewer of a war. 

But this column is not about the reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict, but on how we as Indians view what is going on. What is the filter through which we get our information when war breaks out outside our immediate region? Would we have paid more attention if journalists from Indian media organisations had also been reporting from the region? If we do not see Indian bylines in the reportage from there, why is that so?   

If you look at the “World” page of any major Indian newspaper, you will notice that most of the stories are from international news agencies like Reuters or by the news service of major Western newspapers like the New York Times. Rarely do you see an Indian byline.

One could argue that the Israel-Palestine conflict does not touch most Indians. Hence, media houses would not be interested in investing in sending journalists to cover the conflict. However, it must be noted that two small independent digital platforms, The News Minute and Newslaundry, have raised funds to send veteran television journalist Sreenivasan Jain to report from the region. Here’s a link to his first report.

Even if mainstream news organisations in India conclude that their average reader or viewer is not interested in a war taking place in some other part of the world, what about our immediate neighbourhood? Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal.

There was a time when several national newspapers had correspondents in all these countries. That did not last long. It was only The Hindu that persisted and sent correspondents to report from our neighbouring countries.

For decades, Haroon Habib, a veteran Bangladeshi journalist, reported for The Hindu from Dhaka. His reports were nuanced. They had context, and for anyone wanting to understand the developments in that country, Habib’s reports were a must. He stopped reporting some years ago. And since then, despite the recent tumultuous developments in that country, neither The Hindu nor any other paper has had a full-time correspondent in Dhaka.

In Sri Lanka too, The Hindu has always had a correspondent, and today, it is the only one that has one in Colombo. In fact, with the election of President Anura Kumar Dissanayake last month, it was The Hindu’s reporting that provided important insights into the impact of this change on relations between Sri Lanka and India. This comes through in this podcast featuring Amit Barua, who worked with The Hindu till recently, Nirupama Subramanian, a former Sri Lanka correspondent of the publication, and Meera Srinivasan, who is currently based there.

The Hindu also had a presence in Pakistan for decades. But in 2014, its correspondent and the journalist representing PTI were asked to leave by the Pakistani government. Since then, there has been no Indian reporter in the country, although PTI has a local journalist who files stories. As a result, all we read is agency copy, usually on statements by politicians, unlike in the past when at least The Hindu carried stories on the different aspects of life in Pakistan, including arts and culture. 

Even in Nepal, which is easily accessible to Indians, no Indian newspaper has had a full-time correspondent stationed there. We get news of disasters and changes of government, but little else.

The result is that even when there are dramatic developments, as in Sri Lanka two years ago and last month in the presidential elections, and more recently in Bangladesh, the news coverage is at best perfunctory. Agency copy gives us the bare facts. Rarely does it have adequate background or context that a correspondent based there can provide.

Apart from our immediate neighbours, Indian newspapers don’t at present have anyone reporting from China, a country that is constantly in the news on various counts. Again, in the past, most major newspapers stationed journalists in Beijing. The reason was obvious. An Indian journalist would be able to sift what news would interest Indian readers. 

Coming back to West Asia, for years The Hindu had a correspondent based in Dubai whose remit was to cover the region. He had the resources to travel and report. The bylines of journalists like Kesava Menon and Atul Aneja were known to the readers of The Hindu. Today, you will not find an Indian byline for any story on the Israel-Palestine conflict or even from Iran that has now been drawn into this rapidly escalating conflict.

A major reason for this drastic reduction in people reporting from around the world is economics. Print media has faced drastic cuts in advertising revenue. As a result, barring those media houses that dominate a particular market, most have had to scale down news coverage.

Context, of course, is needed in all news coverage. Take, for instance, the dramatic developments before Gandhi Jayanti, October 2, in Delhi, when the march led by Sonam Wangchuk from Ladakh was stopped at the Delhi border. Wangchuk has been leading the demand for full statehood for Ladakh ever since it was reduced to a Union Territory in 2019 along with Jammu and Kashmir with the reading down of Article 370. His latest demand is for Ladakh to be included in Schedule 6 of the Constitution, which will give the people of Ladakh the right to decide how their natural resources will be used. While the political demand has featured in the reports, not enough is known about the latter.

This article in Scroll explains why pastoralists in Ladakh are objecting to the plan to set up a 13-gigawatt integrated renewable energy project with solar farms and windmills. The energy generated will be used not in Ladakh but outside the region. Setting up this kind of project, which will occupy vast tracts of land, will deny these people access to their traditional pasture lands and affect their migration routes. This is one of the reasons the people of Ladakh want the right to decide whether they want or need these kinds of projects. 

Such stories illustrate how essential it is for the media to have feet on the ground, in India, and in our neighbourhood.

The paradox of India’s woman politician

 Article in The Hindu Sunday Magazine

Published on September 29, 2024

Link: https://www.thehindu.com/society/india-woman-politician-balance-ambitions-identity-expectations-mamata-banerjee-atishi-vinesh-phogat/article68676929.ece

Three women in politics have grabbed headlines in recent weeks. One is a veteran politician, now facing flak for her actions, or rather inaction. The other is a highly qualified woman who chose to go into politics, and did some things that made her stand out as different but is now falling into the expected stereotype of a woman politician beholden to a male mentor. And the third, known for her physical strength and spirit of defiance, has taken the risk of entering the political circus where she will need more than these two qualities.

The three are Mamata Banerjee, Atishi and Vinesh Phogat. The first has been tested, the second has challenges hovering above her, and the third is still finding her feet.

What is common in all three cases is the expectation that somehow, because they are women, their actions will be different from their male counterparts’ if faced with similar challenges.

Indeed, for decades, those who believe more women should be in politics, and hold office, have argued that not only is this just, given that women represent half the population, but that their presence in numbers would make a qualitative difference to the nature of politics and governance. As Ranjana Kumari, an early and strong advocate for increasing women’s participation in politics in India, reiterated in one of her articles: “Women’s participation in politics is their human right as much as it is the cornerstone of their right to equal citizenship. Across the country, and throughout the world, men’s dominance in politics must be made a thing of the past.”

Unfortunately, men’s dominance in politics prevails. In India, despite several women being elected to power in the states, and at the Centre, one cannot draw any generalised conclusions about their style of governance and whether it differs from that of men in the same position. The women who can assert their individual style are those who also control their political party, as did Indira Gandhi. Others inevitably must fall in line.

Take, for instance, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. Here is a woman who has made her way in the tough arena of politics without a male mentor. She has earned a reputation as a street fighter and has built a formidable political presence in her state. And she controls her party, much as Indira Gandhi did.

However, the events that followed the rape and murder of a young junior doctor at the R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata on August 9 have raised serious questions about her leadership style, with critics calling out her insensitivity to an issue that concerns all women.

It was assumed that Banerjee’s response to the protests after August 9 would be sympathetic to the young people on the streets because as a woman, she understood the dangers women face in the public space. Instead, what we saw was a politician at work, trying to ensure that her chief political opponents did not take advantage of the situation. Not only did this push back the central issue, that of women’s safety, but it also disappointed those who expected a humane response from Banerjee.

Although the protests have subsided after the Chief Minister finally agreed to meet the agitating junior doctors, her response to the incidents over the past few weeks has raised several questions about women in politics. Why are only women politicians expected to prioritise women’s concerns even at the cost of political survival? Is it realistic to expect someone politically strong like Banerjee to respond differently to the events around August 9 just because she is a woman?

Besides, what about the 11 feisty and articulate women MPs from the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) in the Lok Sabha? Their silence since August 9 has been deafening. Perhaps they were ordered to be silent. Or they tried to intervene behind the scenes. We will never know.

Only one TMC senior member has spoken out and resigned, and that is a man — Rajya Sabha member Jawhar Sircar. In his letter of resignation, not only does he call out the culture of corruption and authoritarianism in the party but also criticises the “faulty handling” of the protests by the West Bengal government.

After Sircar’s resignation, some of the 35 TMC women MLAs in West Bengal were approached by media houses and asked what they thought. Only a handful spoke on the record. While some blamed the police, all of them reiterated that they did not think “Didi” did anything wrong. Their response is not surprising given that no political party permits its members to state their opinions freely, especially if they run counter to the party line. Therefore, to expect women members to speak out just because they are women is probably unrealistic.

There are other examples, cutting across the political spectrum, where you see the same scenario playing out. For instance, look at the record of two prominent women from the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party — Smriti Irani and Nirmala Sitharaman. Neither distinguished themselves with a pro-women stance when given the chance.

As Minister for Women and Child Development in the BJP’s second term, Irani strongly condemned atrocities against women, but only if they occurred in Opposition-ruled states. The condition of women in states run by her own party did not move her. The most egregious example of that was her silence, and indeed that of her party, on the gang rapes in Manipur last year. Recently, Sitharaman, who continues as Finance Minister, made some shockingly insensitive remarks following the death of a young woman employee of a leading accounting firm. Although she later backtracked, her instinctive response tells the story.

Until September 21, Banerjee was the only woman chief minister of a state. Today, one more has joined the ranks — Atishi from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) who has taken over as the Chief Minister of Delhi after the incumbent, Arvind Kejriwal, resigned on September 17.

Can a woman, who on her own admission is simply a seat warmer, make any difference as the chief minister of a state like Delhi? Although she is not related to Kejriwal, is her appointment any different from that of Rabri Devi, who became Bihar’s chief minister when her husband Lalu Prasad Yadav was imprisoned in the fodder scam case in 1997?

Atishi is highly qualified, with two Master’s degrees from Oxford University. She need not have entered politics. But she did, first as an adviser to AAP for their programme to improve government schools in Delhi and then, after getting elected, as a minister handling multiple portfolios.

Kejriwal obviously chose Atishi because she is seen as someone who would not threaten his primary position in the party. That said, for Atishi to bend over backwards to underline that she’s just filling in for the man who has the right to that chair — to the point that she has kept an empty chair in her office — is disappointing and reflects the way women internalise the need to appear subservient to male power. One wonders, if instead of Atishi, Kejriwal had chosen a man, would he have done this?

What about the third woman in the news: Vinesh Phogat? These are early days. She is still a work in progress as a politician but has already created a buzz amongst young women in the ultra-conservative Haryana society. She has become a role model not only as an athlete, and as a young woman who took to the streets to raise her voice against a powerful man, but also for taking a risk by entering the political arena. Whether her training as a wrestler prepares her for the fights ahead in the political field, including the misogyny she has already encountered, remains to be seen.

Neither Banerjee, nor the women MPs from her party, nor Atishi, have so far convincingly demonstrated a different type of politics from the male-dominated political culture. As in other professions, women manoeuvre within existing structures and societal expectations of how they should behave.

Referring to these expectations, former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers, who served in the first Clinton administration and was the first woman to hold that position, writes in her engaging 2008 book, Why Women Should Rule The World: “Women are caught in a double bind: expected to act like men — and punished for doing just that…When women in positions of authority, conform to traditional female stereotypes, they are too often perceived as ‘too soft’ to be effective. And when they defy those norms, they are considered ‘too tough’, unnaturally masculine, out of sync. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.”

Clearly, the Indian women in politics are caught in the same double bind. Their actions are scrutinised far more closely than that of their male counterparts and their numbers in politics are still too small to overturn the dominant political culture.

The Blank Editorials Of Emergency: When Silence Speaks

Published in Outlook magazine on September 19, 2024

Link: https://www.outlookindia.com/national/the-blank-editorials-of-emergency-when-silence-speaks

Ironic is it not, that a film on the Emergency was held up by what we call the Censor Board (officially the Central Board of Film Certification)? For it was during this infamous Emergency from 1975-77 that the Indian media, at that time essentially the print media, faced direct censorship for the first, and only time, since Independence.

On June 26, 1975, when the Indira Gandhi-led government declared a state of Emergency and announced that there would be press censorship, none of us knew what this meant. Censorship? How? Who would execute the policy? What were we as journalists supposed to do?

At the time, I was working with a small independent news magazine called Himmat Weekly, founded by Rajmohan Gandhi who was also the editor-in-chief. I had joined as an assistant editor, and as the name suggests, our remit was to have the courage to call out the powerful and write about the powerless. Within six months of the declaration of the Emergency, I became the magazine’s editor as R M Lala, one of the founding editors, stepped down.

On that first day, our small team of mostly young journalists had to decide what to do. Should we submit to censorship? Or shut shop? Or should we find a way around it, even if it meant taking considerable risks given that practically all the Opposition leaders had been swept up and thrown in jail and even journalists and other critics were not spared. Perhaps it was our youth, our ignorance or sheer bravado that made most of us feel we should fight censorship and continue to publish as long as we could.

Much like the other, and better-known instances of defiance, such as the The Indian Express printing a blank front page to inform its readers about censorship, Himmat Weekly too ran blank editorials in its first two issues. Only to be told that even leaving a blank space violated the censorship guidelines.

These “guidelines” trickled down to the press during the days we were not informed that we had to clear all our copy with an official. As a result, in those initial weeks, publications took chances to see how far they could stretch the meaning of these guidelines.

The guidelines were vague. The first one, for instance, stated: “Where news is plainly dangerous, newspapers will assist the Chief Press Adviser by suppressing it themselves. Where doubts exist, reference may and should be made to the nearest Press Adviser.” In other words, we were left to decide what was “dangerous”.

But that window closed quite rapidly. The bigger newspapers were sent a representative from the censor’s office who sat in the newsroom in the evening and checked copy. We, who were small, and one had hoped so insignificant, that we could escape the eye of the censor, had to physically go each day with our typed copy to the censor’s office, wait till he decided what could and could not be printed, and scramble back to find enough copy to fill the magazine.

The guidelines were not set in stone. They morphed and changed as new advisories were sent from the centre through the Information and Broadcasting Ministry, then headed by V C Shukla. The nature and volume of these guidelines came to be known only after the Emergency when a commission of inquiry under Justice J C Shah was established. The Shah Commission report revealed that new guidelines were sometimes issued verbally and a phone call from the ministry in Delhi to the censor could lead to action against a publication deemed to be defiant or running material that was “prejudicial”.

For instance, Himmat Weekly was hauled over the coals for printing this quote from Mahatma Gandhi: “The restoration of free speech, free association and free press is almost the whole of Swaraj.” We were informed that this was “prejudicial” and asked to pay a fine of Rs 20,000—a huge amount in those days for a small magazine that could barely break even. Instead of paying it, we went to court. Another story that got us into trouble was for reporting that on October 2, 1976, Acharya Kripalani and others, including Rajmohan Gandhi, had been detained for going to Raj Ghat on Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary.

On that first day, our small team of mostly young journalists had to decide what to do. Should we submit to censorship? Or shut shop? Or should we find a way around it, even if it meant taking considerable risks.

I give these examples to explain the arbitrary nature of censorship and how power is wielded during times when no one can ask questions. The person in-charge of censoring the press in Maharashtra was a senior journalist, a former editor of The Indian Express. Many of us had known him in his earlier avatar. Yet, as fellow journalists, we could not argue with him or demand an explanation for why he decided what was “prejudicial” or violated the ever-expanding list of censorship guidelines. He knew he had the power, and we knew the price of defiance.

Despite this, small journals like Himmat Weekly, Freedom First edited by Minoo Masani, Janata Weekly, whose publisher Dr G G Parikh is now 99 years old and still as feisty as ever, and others found ways to get around censorship by taking calculated risks.

In spite of our limited reach, these journals remained under scrutiny during the entire period. Himmat Weekly was forced to find another printer as the place where we had printed the magazine from its inception was told that it risked being shut down if it continued to print magazines like ours. We survived, just about, by raising money from our readers to buy a small printing press. By shouldering the legal risk of any fallout from the content we carried, we were somehow able to persuade another printer to print the bulk of the magazine.

Censorship worked in other ways too. The government had divided publications into the following categories: positively friendly, hostile, and continuously hostile. This determined who would receive government or public sector advertising. For journals like Himmat Weekly, obviously in the third category, this meant that the few advertisements we did get from some public sector companies and banks stopped. Given our precarious financial situation, which fluctuated each week depending on the advertisements we received, this was a virtual death blow. Yet, the magazine managed to survive for the entire period.

This form of indirect control on the media did not disappear once the Emergency ended in 1977. Even today, governments, at the Centre and particularly in the states, leverage advertising to exert editorial control. The only difference now, as compared to the 1970s, is that the private sector has grown and is a substantial source of revenue for the media. But then that leads to another kind of editorial control evident in the virtual absence of rigorous investigative reporting in Indian media on the many transgressions of big business.

Furthermore, efforts to exert direct control on the media have accelerated in the last decade under the Modi government. The pressure on independent digital news platforms is especially apparent. Even if their reach is much smaller than the bigger media houses, they are under scrutiny, much as small magazines like Himmat Weekly were during the Emergency. Although the current government has backtracked on some of the regulations it had planned to introduce to control independent media, such as provisions in the Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill 2023, the desire to control is evident.

Censorship during the Emergency blocked out the voices of dissidents. But it also silenced the voices of the poor and the powerless. Today, almost five decades later, we must ask ourselves: is the Indian media, bigger and more diverse than during the Emergency, really all that different?