From climate change to healthcare: Why is there no space for these issues in Big Media?

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 3, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/09/03/from-climate-change-to-healthcare-why-is-there-no-space-for-these-issues-in-big-media

So, "the longest war", as the US media insists on calling their country's engagement in Afghanistan, has ended. But is this really the end of the story? And has war and conflict really ended in a country ravaged by both for decades?

As you scroll through the extensive coverage in the international media leading up to the American withdrawal, there is next to nothing about another war that Afghanistan has been facing well before the takeover by the Taliban.

Of course, the repatriation of Afghans wanting to move out of the country will continue to engage the international media and, to some extent, what happens to women's education and employment. But alongside this is the humanitarian crisis that has been unfolding in the country even before the Taliban took over on August 15. How will Afghanistan's economy, so heavily dependent on foreign aid, survive? Who will be hit the hardest by this drastic downturn?

Apart from the economic crisis, according to this Reuters report, Afghanistan has been reeling under a severe drought. An estimated 12 million people, out of a population of 36 million, are facing “a food security crisis of not knowing when or where their next meal will come from”. This is in addition to rising food costs across the country. So, irrespective of the political developments or the kind of government that is eventually formed or whether it is recognised by the world, the harsh reality facing millions of Afghans will be finding food for their next meal.

The healthcare system in the country is also close to collapse. A representative of Médecins Sans Frontières is quoted in this report saying: “The overall health system in Afghanistan is understaffed, under-equipped and underfunded, for years. And the great risk is that this underfunding will continue over time.” As a result, the existing health facilities are already running short of supplies, even in the cities. One can imagine how much more dire the situation must be in the rural areas.

With the media restricted, will we ever know the suffering of ordinary Afghans who live away from the cities? According to Reporters Without Borders, less than 100 of the 700 women journalists in Kabul are still working. “Women journalists are in the process of disappearing from the capital,” it notes as many Afghan journalists, women and men, are leaving the country. At the same time, the international media have drastically reduced their presence. So, who will write these stories?

It is perhaps inevitable that geopolitics and speculation about what the Taliban will do will continue to dominate the news. This is, in any case, a given in most countries, including in India. Here, political news and government pronouncements hog news space while reports about drought, floods, hunger, and environmental crises are barely reported, if at all.

For instance, even as newspapers were spilling over with advertisements and sage pronouncements about “India at 75”, marking the beginning of India's 75th year of independence, an estimated 2.25 lakh people in 15 districts in Assam were affected by floods. Just going by numbers affected, this is newsworthy. And even if floods are an annual occurrence, in the past, such natural disasters would be reported and featured in the "national" pages of newspapers. Today, you have to work hard to find such news except in the newspapers of that region.

Then take healthcare. One of the positive outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic has been that health coverage in the media has been given importance. In the past, reporters assigned the health beat scarcely got any recognition. Today, many of them, the majority of them being women journalists, are names we recognise for the excellent and persistent coverage they have done of the pandemic.

But there are other diseases too that afflict and kill Indians at all times. Many of these diseases, such as malaria, dengue and encephalitis, are closely linked with the appalling sanitary conditions in which millions of people live in cities and villages. The boastful advertisements and statements about the success of campaigns like Swachh Bharat, etc have failed miserably to make a dent on innumerable fetid open drains and sewers around which poor communities live because they have no option to move elsewhere. These are the people who struggle each monsoon with vector-borne diseases, and the poor state of our health infrastructure makes their lives even more precarious.

This distressing report in Newslaundry of an apparent “mystery illness” that has already killed 34 children in Firozabad, Uttar Pradesh, is just one of similar reports you can find in the media if you look hard enough. The media's neglect of these stories compounds the crisis as governments, like that of Yogi Adityanath in UP, can get away with boasting about what a superb job they are doing in looking after the health of people living in their states.

Then take another perennial, the impact of global warming. This is drawing considerable attention worldwide, partly due to the increase in forest fires in Europe and the US, as also flash floods and now hurricanes. The environmentalist Bill McKibben, who has been writing and campaigning on the links between global warming and the continuing burning of fossil fuels with extreme climate events, reiterates yet again in a piece in the New Yorker that the latest hurricane to land on the shores of the US is the result of simple physics. No one can put it better than he does when he writes:

“Hurricanes...draw their power from heat in the ocean. If there’s more heat, the hurricane can get stronger. Physics. Warm air can hold more water than cold air can. So in warm, arid areas you get more evaporation, and hence more drought, and hence more fire. Physics. The water that’s been evaporated into the atmosphere comes down: more flooding rainfall. Physics. The earth runs on energy. We’re trapping more of it near the planet’s surface because of the carbon dioxide that comes from burning coal and gas and oil. That energy expresses itself in melting ice sheets, in rising seas, in the incomprehensible roar of the wind as a giant storm crashes into a city of steel and glass. It’s not, in the end, all that complicated.”

But in India, our coverage of the impact of climate change remains sporadic. In Mumbai, for instance, the municipal commissioner is quoted as saying that 80 percent of Mumbai's Nariman Point (a business district), and Mantralaya (seat of the state government) will be underwater by 2050. He was speaking at the launch of the Mumbai Climate Action Plan website. He also said that in the last 15 months, Mumbai had been hit by three cyclones.

Yet, the city's municipal corporation that he heads is hell-bent on building a coastal road that will increase fossil-fuel guzzling privatised transport, benefit only a small percentage of the population, and add to the city's existing burden of air pollution besides contributing to global warming. There has been practically no discussion in local media questioning the municipal commissioner or debating how India's financial capital will survive if large parts are submerged in just 30 years.

Apart from the impact of global warming, a report by the University of Chicago's Air Quality Life Index finds that India is the most polluted country in the world. Air pollution, it states, could cut life expectancy by nine years in north India and 2.5 years in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. While organisations dedicated to environmental issues like the Centre for Science and Environment have been campaigning for action, mainstream media also needs to find ways to illustrate how this will affect the lives of people, particularly the poorest and most marginalised. Without that, there is little hope of policy makers feeling any kind of pressure to take action.

Even if subjects like climate change, pollution, health care, sanitation, and nutrition don't grab headlines, they affect the survival of millions of people. And just on those grounds, they are “newsworthy”.

Unfortunately, given the nature of the dominant media India, namely television news, the concept of what constitutes news has been so distorted that not just the subjects that I've mentioned, but entire regions and populations of this country, are being permanently obscured. Unlike in Afghanistan, there are plenty of journalists in India who can cover these stories. But the space for them to report on these issues is shrinking by the day.

Media lessons from Afghanistan: Look at processes, not just events

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 19, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/08/19/media-lessons-from-afghanistan-look-at-processes-not-just-events

Images define events. They are the markers of memory of momentous events.

There is no question that of all the images from Afghanistan – following the takeover of Kabul by the Taliban and the capitulation of the US-backed Afghan government led by Ashraf Ghani – the one that will remain as a tragic reminder of what is unfolding is this video. It shows desperate Afghans running alongside a US Air Force plane at the Kabul airport. People are clinging to the wheels and anything they can hold.

Despite this, the plane takes off. Additional recordings reveal at least two bodies falling from the plane. The story of those two men was pieced together by Vijayta Lalwani of Scroll who managed to speak to the man in Kabul on whose roof the corpses fell.

Afghanistan has been, and continues to be, the dominant story in international media, and less so in Indian media. What is being called the "stunning" and unexpectedly quick takeover of the country by the Taliban, with practically no resistance from the established government or its US-trained and funded forces, has left experts and politicians asking questions as to how this happened.

As expected, the focus of much of the reporting is not only on the desperation of those who want to leave the country, particularly people who had worked for western governments and who fear reprisals, but also the future of women. For in the last two decades, the status of Afghan women has been one of the major justifications for the continued presence of the US and other forces in the country, given the severe restrictions the Taliban had imposed on them during its previous reign.

For the media, the story of Afghanistan, particularly over the last two decades after the US invasion and the removal of the previous Taliban government, holds out several lessons. These apply not only to how we cover conflict, and post-conflict, but also whether we listen to, and report the voices of those who do not automatically come forward to speak.

For instance, one of the questions being asked post the Taliban takeover is whether the coverage by the media, particularly international media, gave us an adequate understanding of the processes underway in a country of huge contrasts between rural and urban and a range of ethnicities. Academics who have studied Afghanistan closely point out that the Taliban was growing in its reach quietly in the last decade and that it was also changing in its composition from being largely Pashtun to a force that included many more of the multiple ethnicities that are part of their country.

Another question is whether the international media conveyed the growing disillusionment in the countryside with the incumbent Afghan government and the high levels of corruption. The New York Times, in an editorial titled "The tragedy of Afghanistan", writes, "The corruption was so rampant that many Afghans began to question whether their government or the Taliban was the greater evil." If that is so, was this reported? If it was reported, then why are people surprised that the Taliban were accepted without a fight?

Peter W Klein, executive director of the Global Reporting Centre, writes in the Columbia Journalism Review about how he thinks journalism failed in Afghanistan. Looking critically at conflict reporting, he writes, "Many of us who have reported on the war stepped into the trap reporters often fall into, entranced by the drama of battles and the spin of military leaders."

He writes of how "a giddy excitement burns through newsrooms when there’s talk of a military action. War has built-in drama, pathos, characters, heroes, villains, patriotism, action – not to mention gripping images, the kind civilians will never witness firsthand”. And yet, Klein writes, "What we often fail to do is step back and reflect on the meaning of the larger war, and its likely legacy. Patriotism plays a part, especially if a reporter is covering troops from their own country."

Only a detailed study of media coverage of Afghanistan over the last two decades can confirm this, but it would be fair to say the dominant focus in most reports by the international media was on the continuing conflict, and not necessarily on what was happening on the ground away from the capital city of Kabul.

Apart from the frequent clashes between the Taliban and Afghan forces that were reported, what else was the militant group up to in the last two decades? According to a report by the International Crisis Group, the Taliban had created a PR machine as far back as 2008 and the tools it used to spread the message included DVDs, pamphlets and cassettes as well as sermons in mosques. It is possible that because the media mostly focused on episodic clashes, such a strategy would have slipped under the radar.

The reason these questions have relevance not just for international media but also for us here is because reporting on conflicts within this country is also an important part of our job. Yet, we tend to report the event, and sometimes miss out on informing our readers and viewers about the context, or the processes that led to the conflict.

As an example, take Northeast India. The younger generation in the rest of India, referred to by people in the Northeast as the "mainland", would probably not be aware that for decades, several states in the region were dominated by different kinds of clashes -- between the Indian government and militant groups, between different ethnic groups within the states, and conflicts between the states. In contrast, today the region appears peaceful, but only on the surface. And when something bursts through that veneer of peace, people are surprised.

So when six Assamese policemen died in a clash on the border of Assam and Mizoram recently, most readers in the "mainland" would have been puzzled. Why should there be border wars between two Indian states? While the clashes were reported, only a handful of print newspapers and digital platforms took the trouble to explain the background to the clash and why the tension had persisted. As happens so often in these cases, the explanation was not simple. It included history but also issues concerning livelihoods, forests, clashing ethnicities, and politics.

Then, on August 15, the relatively peaceful and picturesque capital of Meghalaya, Shillong, was shaken up when masked men dressed in black drove around the city in a stolen vehicle brandishing guns and even threw petrol bombs at the chief minister's residence. They were protesting the alleged "encounter" death of a former militant in his home two days earlier. The city was placed under curfew. The state's home minister resigned. But who would have even known that there was militancy in Meghalaya?

In fact, as in every other conflict, there were reasons behind this sudden outburst in the relatively peaceful state of Meghalaya as this article points out. Yet, as several journalists from the Northeast have often complained, such processes are often ignored or cursorily reported by the mainstream media in India.

Both the Assam-Mizoram border clash and the developments in Shillong indicate that there are developments on the ground that we in the media largely ignore or fail to understand and report. Event-oriented and sporadic reporting of regions like the Northeast reinforces ignorance and misunderstanding about the people and their problems. As the Indian Express rightly pointed out in its editorial of August 19, "The Northeast has a long history of governance failures widening fault lines and leading to divisive ethnic mobilisations and violence...The administration has been swift and successful in containing the violence, but these localised events do point to insecurities on the ground. The government needs to recognise, and be sensitive to, the numerous fault lines that shape ethnic, regional and political relations in the region."

Given the nature of the Indian media, with its obsession with "breaking news" and the dominance of television news as well as social media, it is virtually impossible to negotiate the time and space required to do the kind of reporting that heeds the silent processes that precede spectacular events. Yet, the recent developments in Afghanistan should remind us of the importance of keeping an eye on processes, not just events.

Mumbai’s mochis are back!

 Written on August 14, 2021

 

A day before we have to suffer speeches reeking of hypocrisy to mark our Independence Day, I was reminded yet again that words like freedom, independence, even nation have a different meaning depending on where you’re situated in life.

 

One of my preoccupations during the serial lockdowns has been to walk the streets and observe what’s the same and what’s changed in the city.

 

In early June, I saw an interesting small poster hanging on a wall near Bharatiya Vidya Bhawan, an institution established by K. M. Munshi. It read:’ joota Japani ho ya Hindustani, toot hi jaata hai. Layen mochi ke paas’. (Your shoe might be from Japan or India, but it will break. Bring it to the mochi’. Except that there was no mochi in sight. 

 

 

 

Today I walked past the same spot and there was Ajay from Jabalpur. He’s been in Mumbai, sitting in this spot for 8 years, a job he felt compelled to do after his father, who was also a mochi, died. He says he’s studied up to 11th standard but couldn’t complete his studies. 

 

 

 

 

He now has a gleaming new poster with his mobile number. Services include ‘chain mixing’ which he explained meant repairing zips! He also repairs umbrellas and all manner of chappals and shoes.

 

 

 

Meeting this young man, and visualising his precarious existence, was a reminder of how many thousands of such stories need to be recorded in this city of extreme riches and extreme poverty. 

 

Let me add a footnote.  For some reason, everyone -- the government, politicians, even the media -- believes and is talking about "India at 75".  India gained Independence from the British in 1947.  In 1948 it completed one year as a free country.  By that calculation, this year it completes 74 years not 75.  Next year, that is 2022, is completes 75.  I should know as I was born in 1947!

 

 

Dalit child’s ‘rape’ in Delhi shows all that’s wrong with our country

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 5, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/08/05/dalit-childs-rape-in-delhi-shows-all-thats-wrong-with-our-country

In his engagingly written August 3 frontpage story in the Indian Express, about the Indian Women's hockey team at the Olympics, Mihir Vasavda wrote, “Each player has overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to reach this far: prejudice, poverty and patriarchy." Those three words encapsulate the story of Indian women, not just the remarkable lot wielding hockey sticks in Tokyo.

Prejudice, poverty, patriarchy. All three came together on August 1, when a 9-year-old Dalit girl, the only child of poor parents, went to a nearby crematorium to fill cold water from the cooler there. She never returned. She was dead by the time her mother saw her. Told that her only child had been electrocuted, the mother watched helplessly as the priest at the crematorium proceeded to cremate the child. “Don’t shout,” he allegedly told her.

This happened in India of 2021, in its national capital, in a week when the parliament was in session, when the most powerful politicians of this country were present in the same city where this little girl lived and died.

Can we then discuss the state of the nation or its politics, or even the state of India's media, without addressing what this horrific crime represents for India and what it reflects about our society?

There are many layers to the story of this alleged rape and murder in Old Nangli village in Delhi. One of the first, and so far the best, report on it was by Nidhi Suresh of Newslaundry who was on the spot, spoke to the parents, the police, and witnesses. Her reporting, including the video, is heart-wrenching and chilling, especially as it reveals that the priest, who allegedly forcibly cremated the little girl's body, is one of the four men charged with her murder and gangrape.

The report also brings out the sense of entitlement and impunity that men like this priest have that they could confidently instruct the family of the child to cremate her rather than go to the police.

This incident also brings back memories of January 2018, when an eight-year-old Bakerwal girl, the daughter of shepherds in Kathua, Jammu and Kashmir, was gangraped and killed. The crime took place in a religious place, and the priest was one of the men charged with rape and convicted.

The Kathua case led to nationwide protests. The court had to intervene to remind the media that neither the name nor the photograph of the child can be used when reporting crimes against minors under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act. The media fell in line after the court's orders. By then, her name and face had already been splattered across publications.

This time, the media has followed the law, including ensuring that the faces of the girl's parents are obscured when they are interviewed on camera. In the past, even if the media did not name the victim, they gave away plenty of clues by naming the parents, identifying the exact locality where they lived and other such details. In other words, everything that would identify the victim barring her name.

As the girl was Dalit, inevitably comparisons are being drawn to the gangrape and murder of a 19-year-old Dalit woman in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh, in September 2020. In both cases, the body was cremated without the consent of the family; in Hathras by the police and in Delhi by the priest.

Apart from the similarities between this crime and other cases in the past, there are several aspects that are notable, especially where the media and politics are concerned.

The site of the atrocity, the national capital, inevitably draws far greater attention in terms of both the media gaze and politics. Although Dalit women are raped and killed in numbers every year, the few cases that come to light are those that the media can access, or chooses to do so.

While this unequal media gaze distorts the reality of the extent of crimes against women, in the past it has been helpful. Media attention pushes governments to act, at least in the short term. We have seen this repeatedly in rape cases, and most dramatically in 2012 after the gangrape in Delhi. That led to the appointment of the Justice Verma Committee and substantial changes in the law, including the introduction of the death penalty (which incidentally was not recommended by the committee). The media focus following the rape and murder of the eight-year-old in Kathua also resulted in the death penalty being introduced for rape of minors under the POCSO Act.

Yet, the experience of the parents of the 9-year-old in Delhi reminds us yet again that, despite the changes in the law, the systemic problems in the criminal justice system remain. Not only were the parents treated insensitively by the police when they went to register the complaint, the police booked the four men accused of their daughter’s rape and murder under fairly minor provisions of the law. Only once the case was publicised did they agree to add the stringent provisions under the POCSO Act and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act.

The incident also reminds us yet again that despite the introduction of the death penalty for rape, the incidents of rape have not declined. The latest National Crime Records Bureau figures (available only up to 2019) show 32,033 rapes in one year. This figure is likely a gross underestimation as it is now well established that the majority of rapes that take place inside homes, or are committed by men known to the survivor, are never reported.

We have to wait and watch whether this time the media will focus on the crime or, as in the Kathua and Hathras cases, politics will dominate, making what happened almost incidental. This is already evident in some of the television talk shows since August 1 where the debate centres on whether this or that politician ought to have gone to meet the child's family and also whether her being Dalit is the trigger for their concern.

What then is the role of the media? To document. To get all sides. To try and fill holes in the narrative. But more importantly, to follow-up and not let the story die once the political spotlight moves from it. Many of these stories are multi-layered. Each layer tells us about our society, about prejudice, about patriarchy, about the criminal justice system and its constant failures, and about poverty.

The media must avoid falling into the trap of whataboutery: what about other rapes all over the country, why only this one, etc? Every crime of this nature is precisely that, a crime that must be acknowledged and addressed. In an ideal world, every such crime ought to be noted and reported. But if we can report, investigate, follow up even one like the August 1 incident, without giving more pain to the family of the victim, without reinforcing stereotypes, without obfuscating about the real issues of caste and the reality of child sexual assaults, we will have done a lot.

I have deliberately chosen to focus on only this issue in this column for several reasons, principally because it brings out so much that we fail to acknowledge about this country.

It shows us how technology, economic growth, even education are not making a dent in either caste prejudice and hatred or patriarchy. That despite the uproar that followed the 2012 Delhi gangrape, the changes in the laws, the subsequent change in the POCSO Act following the Kathua rape, our criminal justice system repeatedly fails the poor and marginalised castes. That even as we celebrate the few medals our athletes have won in Tokyo, mostly by women, we must remember the real face of the country we inhabit is represented by the struggles of these women in sports, and the death of girls like the 9-year-old.

From denial to claims it ‘maligns’ India, the government’s response to Pegasus is predictable

 Broken News

Published on July 22, 2021 in Newslaundry

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/07/22/from-denial-to-claims-it-maligns-india-the-governments-response-to-pegasus-is-predictable

 

The government wishes it would just disappear. It will probably try, as it has done in the past, to come up with a diversionary tactic. But Pegasus is here to stay. The unraveling story of the spyware sold by an Israeli company to "vetted governments" that could have infected as many as 50,000 mobile phones in several countries around the world cannot be pushed under the carpet. It is simply too big, and too important.

With daily exposures, some more sensational than others, how has the Indian media responded to this story? The independent digital platform the Wire was one of 17 international media partners, including Washington Post and the Guardian, in 10 countries that collaborated to bring together the Pegasus Project. It was based on material sourced by the Paris-based non-profit journalism organisation Forbidden Stories and assisted by Amnesty International's Security Lab. The vast trove of telephone numbers were suspected to belong to persons of interest to their respective governments, although proof that all these phones were hacked has not yet been established.

The story broke in India on the night before the Parliament reconvened on July 19 for the monsoon session. Typically, on day one, the Indian media's response was lukewarm. While Indian Express, for instance, gave it front page lead, given that amongst the 40 Indian journalists whose numbers were listed as possible targets of surveillance were three from the paper, the Hindu was more cautious, running it on an inside page without mentioning that one of its own correspondents had also figured on this list.

It was when the next tranche of names was released, which included Rahul Gandhi, former election commissioner Ashok Lavasa, and current IT and Railways minister Ashwini Vaishnaw amongst others, that the media woke up and took note.

Since then, the major national dailies have featured the daily revelations prominently. They also cannot ignore the story, as the Opposition has been vociferous in the Parliament demanding an independent inquiry or a joint parliamentary committee. However, Shashi Tharoor, the MP who heads the parliamentary standing committee on information technology, has said that they will take it up and that at the moment a JPC was not needed.

Several newspapers in editorials have also made demands for an independent inquiry. Amongst them is the Indian Express, which asked for an investigation and held that "trying to snoop unlawfully is what maligns Indian democracy". But then, it also asked for "the department of dirty tricks" to "come clean". That's a contradiction in terms as a "dirty tricks" department is precisely that, because it is not "clean".

The Hindu too emphasised the need for an inquiry and deplored the fact that "state agencies can trample upon the lives of citizens in such a manner while elected representatives plead ignorance is unsettling for a democracy. This is antithetical to the basic creed of democracy." And it asked the question that the government has still not answered: "Has any Indian agency bought Pegasus?"

What we have to constantly remind ourselves is that apart from the prominent individuals that featured in the list of 300 names from India whose mobile phones could have been compromised, phones belonging to the woman who accused the former Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi of sexual harassment, and her relatives, were also on the list. If it is confirmed that a spyware designed to help governments deal with terrorism and crime has been used against ordinary citizens, then every citizen has reason to be concerned, not just journalists or politicians.

Also, amongst the 40 journalists whose phones were identified, although not all have been checked to ascertain whether the spyware was planted, are people like Rupesh Kumar Singh from Jharkhand, a journalist who spent six months in jail for exposing the attacks by state actors against adivasis. It would appear that you don't have to be a Delhi-based journalist working for a prominent media organisation to be targeted. If you simply do your job of exposing the wrongs in our society through your journalism, you are a potential target for surveillance.

The government's response to the Pegasus story has been predictable: outright denial, obfuscation and the usual trope of this being a "bid to malign India". It also continues with the well-worn strategy; attack is the best form of defence. So instead of answering a direct question about whether it has used the spyware, the government skirts around it and instead attacks those who ask the question. And, not surprisingly, pro-government television channels have followed the same line.

So, did this government buy the Pegasus software and for how long has it been in use? According to this story by Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar in the Wire, WhatsApp had alerted the government in 2019 of attempts by Pegasus to break its encryption in as many as 121 accounts and that it had succeeded in hacking 20 accounts. Furthermore, in response to an RTI filed by Venkatesh Nayak of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, the ministry of communication, electronics and information technology had acknowledged that WhatsApp had informed them about this attempt to break their encryption. Yet, in the Parliament, the newly appointed IT minister Ashwani Vaishnaw stated that there was no "factual basis" to reports about WhatsApp and the use of Pegasus.

As this column is being written, there are more revelations emerging. And apart from the Opposition, at least some in the media are asking the questions that need to be asked. They are demanding that the government explain whether and when it has bought Pegasus from NSO, the Israeli company, how much it paid for it, to what use has it been put, and what are the systems set up to govern how it will be used. The answers to these questions are crucial, irrespective of whether there can ever be conclusive proof that it was the Indian government that was behind the targeting of individuals with this spyware.

It is also important to remember that although most governments conduct surveillance at various levels, this particular spyware is deadly because it mines all the information people have on their phones, not just their voice calls or location. And it can do this in such a way that the uninitiated would never be able to detect its presence. Given that ordinary citizens are also on the list of potential targets, this is something that would concern more than just journalists, or people in public life.

Several Indian newspapers have done well to explain the process of how the spyware works with graphics. Readers also need to know the background of NSO, and how Pegasus has been used elsewhere. The Guardian provides useful background in its "Today in Focus" podcasts where it is focusing currently on the Pegasus Project.

The bottom line, as far as the media is concerned, is that this government really does not need sophisticated spyware to bully it to fall in line. The largest circulating Hindi newspaper, Dainik Bhaskar, has been consistently calling out the government's lies on the pandemic, especially the underestimates in the death count as well as the shortage of oxygen during the second wave. It has also prominently displayed the Pegasus story on its front page. As if on cue, on July 22, income tax raids were conducted on its offices in Bhopal and elsewhere.

This government's attitude towards individual journalists, or media houses, that attempt to do their jobs as guardians of free speech and expression, is an open secret. Hence, the fact that neither the prime minister nor anyone else from the government had the grace to issue a statement about the killing of the talented, award-winning Indian photojournalist from the Reuters news agency, Danish Siddiqui, in Afghanistan earlier this month comes as no surprise.

Danish's brilliant and evocative photographs will live on, calling out every lie uttered by this government, especially about the impact of the second wave of the pandemic, the mismanagement, the toll on ordinary people, and the deaths. These images cannot be erased. That is the power of an image, truly greater than thousands of words. And this is the uncomfortable truth that the Modi government simply cannot digest.

 

Will mainstream media show the same attention to the Bhima Koregaon case as it did to Stan Swamy’s death?

 Broken News

Published on July 8, 2021 in Newslaundry

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/07/08/will-mainstream-media-show-the-same-attention-to-the-bhima-koregaon-case-as-it-did-to-stan-swamys-death

In a time of constantly breaking news, when events such as the recent dramatic cabinet overhaul in the Modi government tends to sweep all other news off the front pages, it is imperative that the implications of Father Stan Swamy’s death in judicial custody are not forgotten.

On the afternoon of July 5, Father Stan, 84, died at the Holy Family Hospital in Mumbai. He was still in judicial custody in the Bhima Koregaon case, one of 16 who have been incarcerated without trial, charged under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

Father Stan's death represents more than the passing of a fine human being who gave his life for the welfare of Adivasis in Jharkhand, which he considered home. It forces us to think about the callous and cruel nature of the criminal justice system in this country as illustrated in this piece in the Wire by Susan Abraham, one of the lawyers fighting for the Bhima Koregaon accused and the wife of accused Vernon Gonsalves. It also ought to make us question the manner in which laws like the UAPA are increasingly being used to suppress all forms of dissent and interventions for the rights of the most marginalised.

While the Bhima Koregaon case itself has drawn sporadic interest in the media since 2018, when the first arrests were made, Father Stan's death has provoked an unexpected and strong response from national English language papers.

Not only were reports of his death on the front page of practically every leading national daily newspaper, but there were also strong editorial comments. While the Telegraph held that "the State is responsible for Stan Swamy’s death. But the shame of it and the loss it signifies are the Indian people’s", Times of India held the criminal justice system responsible and argued for revisiting provisions of the UAPA. The Hindu saw in the treatment meted out to Father Stan in prison "institutional oppression" and wrote that his death "will weigh on the country’s collective conscience for long". And Indian Express called the attitude of the courts in delaying and denying his legitimate plea for bail on medical grounds a "dark blot"; it concluded that his death "has left the highest institutions of India’s justice system diminished".

At the same time, it must be noted that on the whole, barring routine reports about the cases for bail filed by the 16 (now 15) men and women in the Bhima Koregaon case, the mainstream media did little to highlight the injustice meted out to them or investigate whether the case had any basis.

It was the Washington Post that broke the story about the malware planted on the laptops of Rona Wilson, one of the accused, and subsequently another report about the malware on the laptop of Surendra Gadling. If this is true, then the very basis on which these arrests were made will be proven as baseless. Neither of these stories created more than a ripple in the national media, although Sreenivasan Jain of NDTV did report on it in his programme Reality Check.

The point I am making is that the coverage given to this tragic death of an 84-year-old priest, cannot end with some reports and a few editorials. There is clearly a larger story that needs to be pursued, not just about the Bhima Koregaon case but also about the rampant misuse of the UAPA. Only weeks before Father Stan's death, Akhil Gogoi, who was elected to the Assam assembly while still in jail under the UAPA, was exonerated of all charges. Bashir Ahmad Baba from Srinagar was released after 11 years in prison after being acquitted under all charges under the UAPA. We also have the Delhi High Court judgement granting bail to Natasha Narwal, Devangana Kalita and Asif Tanha that draws attention to the misuse of this law.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, only two percent of those arrested under the UAPA between 2015-19 have been convicted. The rest, one can assume, are still in jail. Each of them has a story that needs telling. Will at least those newspapers, which were moved to comment strongly after Father Stan’s death, take this on?

There is another death that took place a few weeks before Father Stan's that also calls for a pause and introspection about the kind of society we live in. That is the death of a 22-year-old woman in Kerala.

Vismaya from Kollam had been married for only a year to Kiran. Yet, despite complaining about the violence she experienced within the four walls of her home, she was persuaded to remain and give her marriage to an abusive man a chance. It ended with her death.

Within hours of the news about Vismaya, there were reports of a 24-year-old woman's death in Thiruvananthapuram. In both cases, there was a link to dowry.

The giving and taking of dowry was made illegal by the Dowry Prohibition Act in 1961. That made no difference. After campaigns by women's groups in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when newspapers particularly in Delhi carried routine reports about young brides dying in "accidental" kitchen fires, Section 498A was introduced in the Indian Penal Code making the unnatural death of a woman within seven years of marriage a cognizable offence.

Even this has made no difference. Despite the increasing levels of literacy amongst women, and their participation in the workforce, the scourge of dowry remains, and perhaps has become stronger if you go by this well-researched report by Haritha John in the News Minute. What then does this say about Indian society that in the 21st century, a woman's worth continues to be determined by the amount of gold and other "gifts" that her family sends with her to her marital home?

According to this article in Article 14, "Over 38% of murders of women are committed by current or former partners finds the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), and Indian women account for 36% of global female suicide deaths, finds the Harvard School of Public Health despite making up less than 18% of the world’s female population. Suicide is a leading cause of death among women aged 15-29 in India."

The article in the News Minute also raises several important points about the role of the media in perpetuating the prevalence of dowry. In the opinion of Burton Cleetus, an assistant professor of history at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, "When we enforce conventional marriages, the fundamental factor in it is wealth transfer. Though we romanticize marriage, it is basically a market for this wealth transfer. It is the same people and media who speak against the dowry system, who run matrimonial sites. It is the same media that promotes a luxurious lifestyle which creates a desire in people, a desire that is above our income. So on one hand, they promote consumerism, and on the other, they criticise these systems. This is pointless. All these are causes of the problem in a larger perspective.”

Whether one agrees with this analysis or not, it is evident that Vismaya's death has reminded us again how a woman's worth is calculated in modern day India. Economic progress, education, pro-women laws have failed to dent the patriarchy that ensures that most marriages remain a transaction. And the price for an unsatisfactory deal, as viewed from the man's side, is always paid by the woman. For every one report that comes to light, there would be thousands that are never reported.

These are the truths about our society that the media needs to report. Of the thousands unjustly incarcerated under laws that have no place in a democracy. Of an unjust, cruel and callous criminal justice system that denies bail even to the old and ailing. And of the way regressive, patriarchal values continue to ensure that women are treated as little more than a commodity.

 

Should Indian media constantly call out the powerful for peddling falsehoods?

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on June 24, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/06/24/should-indian-media-constantly-call-out-the-powerful-for-peddling-falsehoods

How does a half-truth or an outright lie become a "fact"? When it is uttered by a politician or a celebrity and amplified unquestioningly by the media.

That is one of many challenges facing India's media. How often should you call out the powerful when what they are saying is patently untrue?

The media in the United States did not spend much time debating this when they regularly fact-checked every utterance of former president Donald Trump, who had a habit of being rather liberal with facts. Leading newspapers and TV channels regularly ran fact-checks to inform readers and viewers of the exaggerations and lies that were routinely mouthed by their president even as they had to report what he said. In some instances, television networks chose to stop live relays of his speech when what he said was particularly problematic during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

We have not seen the media doing this in India. The pronouncements of the powerful are routinely telecast or reproduced in print. The next day, an opposition politician might point out that what was said was untrue. If that is reported at all, it will pass without notice. Or an expert could write an article on the edit page contradicting the politician. This again would be read only by the converted, so to speak. Thus, what lives on in public memory is what the powerful person has said.

Does fact-checking the public pronouncements of the powerful even matter?

According to Prof Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University and author of the recently released 2021 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, many Indians thought that much of the misinformation about the pandemic often came from the top. In an edit page piece in the Hindu, he writes, "Study after study around the world has found such 'network propaganda', where misinformation is spread by some top politicians, nakedly partisan news media who cheer them on, and well-organised communities of political supporters active on social media and messaging applications."

Nielsen's advice to the Indian authorities if they want to check misinformation is to " take a cue from the fact that much of the Indian public clearly recognise that misinformation often comes from the top", and "spend less time worrying about activists, journalists, and Twitter".

Indians already paid a heavy price for believing the messages that "come from the top" earlier this year when we were told that the coronavirus crisis was behind us. The media ought to have been more vigilant and could have amplified the voices of those advocating caution and pointing out that even countries with good healthcare infrastructure in the West had been hit by a second and even a third wave of the pandemic. Given the poor state of India's health infrastructure, there was simply no place for the message of Indian exceptionalism that was being propagated.

The impact of the second wave was horrific and sudden only because the warning signs were not heeded. For the media, the story was so stark that it could not be ignored. From the oxygen crisis in Delhi to the half-buried corpses along the Ganga, no self-respecting media house could look the other way and ignore what was going on. As the editors of Dainik Bhaskar, one of the largest Indian newspapers, told Newslaundry, you had to report what you saw.

The paper's Gujarati edition, Divya Bhaskar, was one of the first to track the discrepancy between the official death toll and what its reporters saw on the ground. Since then, apart from Dainik Bhaskar, several mainstream English language papers such as the Hindu have been doing the data crunching to put forward the real number of deaths. Experts and biostatisticians had been predicting that the real numbers would be at least 10 lakh and not the 3.9 lakh officially acknowledged by the government. The persistent stories in different media have not just reiterated these projections, they suggest the total could be even higher.

Yet, there has been no acknowledgment so far from the different state governments, or the central government, that the death data needs drastic revision.

The Reuters Institute report focuses on misinformation with regard to the pandemic. But in the last month, we have seen other forms of misinformation such as about India's vaccination policy. We still have to estimate how much the union government's constantly changing vaccination policy has cost the country in terms of avoiding hospitalizations and deaths and also contributing to vaccine hesitancy.

We are constantly being told that this government has been exceptional in its vaccination policy and if there have been hurdles they have been placed by the obduracy and unreasonable demands of the opposition-ruled states.

We are also told by none other than the prime minister that this is the first time India is producing vaccines. On June 7, in his televised address to the nation, Narendra Modi said, “If you look at the history of vaccinations in India, whether it was a vaccine for smallpox, hepatitis B or polio, you will see that India would have to wait decades for procuring vaccines from abroad. When vaccination programmes ended in other countries, it wouldn't have even begun in our country.”

Is this true? As Jacob Koshy politely points out in the Hindu, this view of India's vaccination policy is "at odds with the facts”. He goes on to list the smallpox vaccine and the polio vaccine as examples of how India manufactured vaccines even before Independence.

That is not all. In his speech, Modi also said that since 2014, that is, since his party came to power and he became the prime minister, under the Indradhanush programme launched by his government, the percentage of children being vaccinated had increased from 60 percent to 90 percent. Yet, this too flies in the face of facts as according to the latest National Family Health Survey, none of the 17 states and five union territories surveyed had touched 90 percent in child vaccination. In fact, reports Koshy, only five states – Himachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Karnataka, Goa and Sikkim – exceeded 80 percent and only Himachal Pradesh touched 89 percent.

Why should this embroidering of history and facts matter? Because if they are not called out, this is what millions of Indians will believe, that only now is India "atmanirbhar", is producing vaccines indigenously and that the current government has given a boost to routine vaccinations too.

All this then flows seamlessly onto June 21, when India is supposed to have broken a "world record" in vaccinating over 86 lakh people in a day. Actually even this so-called "fact" is not true. But the reality of how this even happened is what makes the apparent achievement that the government boasted about more interesting.

For even as various ministers were busy crediting the prime minister and thanking him profusely for this achievement, the story of how it came about was already unravelling in the media. Supriya Sharma in Scroll exposed how the vaccination numbers were noticeably low in the states that hit a high mark on June 21 and that most of these states were ruled by the BJP. For instance, on June 20, Madhya Pradesh had vaccinated only 692 persons. Yet on June 21, it administered 16.9 lakh doses only to sink back to under 5,000 the very next day.

Although initially most mainstream newspapers ran uncritical frontpage stories on this “achievement”, in the days that followed many of them, including the Hindu and the Times of India, were more sceptical. They ran the data of the vaccine shots administered in the days before and after June 21. The figures spoke louder than words: the one-day miracle was only possible because stocks had been hoarded in previous weeks in some states.

The media also pointed out the huge discrepancy between the availability of vaccines, which will not exceed 40 lakh even if the Indian manufacturers operate at maximum capacity, and the requirement to maintain a daily target of 80 lakh or more. Where is the rest of the supply coming from? The government has yet to answer that question.

Then there is the myth of the "free vaccines". Unless constantly reminded, people forget that all vaccines have been free in India, from the smallpox one to BCG to polio. So providing Covid vaccines free to Indians is neither new nor an exceptional achievement of this government.

The reason such fact-checking is even noticed today is because it did not take place sufficiently in the past, and particularly over the last seven years. This has contributed to myth building, to the belief of one leader being not just invincible but also infallible. This myth has helped him and his party ride through multiple mistakes and bad policies that have placed such an enormous economic burden on Indians, especially the poor, apart from mismanaging the ongoing pandemic.

Calling out those who get free airtime merely because they are in power is the duty of a free press. It cannot be otherwise.

Why, despite SC’s Vinod Dua ruling, dissenting journalists won’t be safe

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on June 10, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/06/10/why-despite-scs-vinod-dua-ruling-dissenting-journalists-wont-be-safe

One cheer for the Supreme Court of India. Why only one? Because we still have some way to go before all arbitrary and unreasonable obstructions to freedom of expression are removed in this country.

The June 3 Supreme Court ruling in the Vinod Dua case came as much-needed good news in an otherwise grim year. In their 117-page judgement, Justices UU Lalit and Vineet Saran stated, "Every journalist will be entitled to protection in terms of Kedar Nath Singh, as every prosecution under Sections 124A and 505 of the IPC must be in strict conformity with the scope and ambit of said Sections as explained in, and completely in tune with the law laid down in Kedar Nath Singh."‬

Put simply, this means governments cannot slap sedition cases against journalists who question or criticise policy or report or expose gaps in government performance. That's great and is something about which we in the media ought to be happy and relieved.

Except that this was already established as far back as 1962, that is almost 60 years ago, in the case the judges mention, Kedar Nath Singh vs State of Bihar. Yet, six decades later, neither governments nor the police at the thana level appear to understand what that judgement means given the ease with which Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code dealing with sedition continues to be used against journalists and others.

In fact, a database assembled by the news website Article-14 shows a rise in sedition cases since the BJP took power in 2014. It points out that there was an increase of 28 percent in sedition cases filed between 2014 and 2020.

The case against Dua follows a pattern. In March last year, a BJP politician filed a case against the veteran journalist in Kumarsain, Shimla. He held that on his Vinod Dua Show on YouTube, the journalist made "unfounded and bizarre allegations" against the prime minister and the government. This, he held, was punishable under Sections 124A, 268, 501 and 505 of the Indian Penal Code.

Dua is based in Delhi. The case was filed in Himachal Pradesh. By then, a national lockdown in view of the pandemic had been declared. Movement between states was restricted. Filing a case in a place other than where the journalist resides is the first common feature of such cases.

Dua was luckier than most. He could file a plea in the Supreme Court to quash the case against him. Most other journalists, particularly those based in smaller towns, do not have that ability. For them, just to deal with the first steps of countering such a case is punishment.

So regardless of the case going in Dua's favour in this instance, it is important to remember that the Supreme Court's directions from 60 years ago are regularly flouted and the only way to enforce them is for the aggrieved person to rush to court to appeal.

Secondly, independent journalists, reporting without the backing of large media houses and often from small towns, do not have the resources to fight cases slapped on them even at the first level, leave aside going up to the Supreme Court. If the case is filed in a place other than the one from which you operate, the very process of fighting it becomes expensive and arduous. You have to locate lawyers and spend your own money if the court requires your presence.

Additionally, 124A is only one of several draconian laws that are used against journalists and dissenters. For instance, the Uttar Pradesh chief minister is on record threatening journalists that the National Security Act will be used to arrest anyone reporting what the government considers "false claims", such as the very real shortage of oxygen that occurred in April at the height of the second wave of the pandemic.

Or take the case of the journalist Siddique Kappan, who went to report on the Hathras rape case, but instead was arrested by the Uttar Pradesh police and remains imprisoned over 200 days later on sedition charges and under the anti-terror law UAPA.

In fact, according to this report about the challenges journalists face in UP, even Section 66A of the IT Act (sending "offensive" messages on the internet), which had been struck down by the Supreme Court in 2015, continues to be used.

Hence, when governments have an arsenal of draconian laws that they can use against individuals who dissent, or who report and write critically, the protection provided by a ruling by the Supreme Court is simply not enough. The court cannot monitor every case that is filed in this country. And if cases are filed in small-town police stations on purpose to harass the individual or the journalist, there is nothing that can be done to stop it. By the time the individual fights to get the case heard, he or she has already been punished by the process.

That is why there is every reason to demand, as the Editors Guild of India and other organisations representing journalists have, that this antiquated colonial law should be consigned to the dustbin of history. If India wants to be considered a functioning democracy with an unfettered and free press, there is no place for such laws.

This is what the constitutional law expert Faizan Mustafa argues persuasively in a recent article in the Indian Express. He points out that according to data from the National Crimes Record Bureau, "between 2016 to 2019, there has been a whopping 160 per cent increase in the filing of sedition charges with a conviction rate of just 3.3 per cent. Of the 96 people charged in 2019, only two could be convicted”. These figures are more proof of how the provision is used for harassment even though the chances of conviction are slim.

Why is this happening when as far back as 1962, in the Kedar Nath Singh case, the limits of what constitutes sedition had already been laid out? Has this deterred the misuse of this section in the intervening years? Certainly not if we look at the database assembled by Article-14, referred to earlier.

In any case, the problem with the way this provision is used affects not only journalists but ordinary citizens who use the right granted to them under the Indian constitution to criticise and oppose government policies and programmes. In 2016, I personally saw the bewilderment on the faces of the feisty women from the fishing community of Idinthakarai in Tamil Nadu who were protesting peacefully against the Kudankulam nuclear plant when they were told they had been charged with sedition. Eventually, the Supreme Court granted them relief.

It is surprising, or perhaps not, that there has not been a stronger demand from the media for the sedition law to be declared unconstitutional. The Telegraph has made this demand in its editorial titled "Hurrah". But most editorial positions have been restrained, welcoming the court's ruling but not dissecting why an earlier ruling made no difference in curtailing the misuse of this provision.

The Supreme Court's ruling in the Vinod Dua case is significant, even historic. It might stay the hand of the state for a while in using the sedition law against journalists. But, as in the past, as long as it stays on the statute, its chances of being misused remain strong because at heart most governments want laws that can curb dissent and questioning.

Riverside graves of the Covid dead tell a story of the media’s failure

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on May 27, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/05/27/riverside-graves-of-the-covid-dead-tell-a-story-of-the-medias-failure

The defining image of this second wave of the pandemic in India has now become the hundreds of shallow graves along the Ganga and other rivers, replacing the searing images of burning pyres. These graves are a stark reminder not just of the discrepancy in death data between the official and the actual, but they also hint at a deeper distress in rural India that has been obscured from our view.

We have to be grateful that there are journalists who continue to doggedly pursue this sad and disturbing story of unaccounted deaths. From journalists going around in a car, filming these graves and recording what people have to say, such as Barkha Dutt, to mainstream regional media outlets like Divya Bhaskar and Sandesh in Gujarat refusing to obfuscate and telling the story as it is, to young women journalists like Shivangi Saxena and Akanksha Kumar from Newslaundry, such documentation will form an essential part of the history of these terrible years. Without this, there would have been a veil of disinformation pulled over the eyes of citizens. And false narratives, so beloved of this government, regularly amplified by the media groups beholden to it. And Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath, who continues to maintain that all is well in his state where these shallow graves abound, would not have been called out.

Try as it might, the government simply has no place to hide now as journalists, experts and the international media continue to focus on the discrepancies in the data on deaths and incidence of disease. The latest of these is a data presentation by the New York Times that asks, "Just How Big Could India’s True Covid Toll Be?" Its conservative estimate is that there have been six lakh deaths from Covid but says the more likely number is 16 lakh. The official figure on May 24 was three lakh deaths. That is the extent of the discrepancy.

Indian newspapers have also been writing about this, with Chinmay Tumbe, author of The Age of Pandemics, looking closely at Gujarat's data in the Indian Express and Rukmini S writing about Chennai in the Hindu. Tumbe concludes that "even the most conservative extrapolations from the available excess mortality data take the all-India death toll of the second wave to over a million”. In sum, all these articles are saying the same thing, that both the extent of the spread of the virus and the deaths resulting from it are far in excess of what is revealed by government data.

Even if we were to assume that this is not being done deliberately, in the face of growing evidence, one would have expected a word of acknowledgment from officials that something has gone wrong and needs to be corrected. Instead, there is silence. Or efforts to divert the conversation elsewhere, to "positivity", which in the current context is just another term for denial.

The fact remains that while some newspapers, digital platforms and a couple of TV news channels have focused on this data mismatch, much of mainstream Indian media is not highlighting these facts.

Perhaps Manoj Kumar Jha, the Rashtriya Janata Dal member of the Rajya Sabha, is wrong to brandish the entire Indian media in a scathing oped in the Indian Express when he writes that it has "asphyxiated democracy at a time when the breathless nation is struggling hard to save its loved ones”. Yet, it is difficult to argue against his reflection that "mainstream media houses shamefully defending the indefensible must remember that the annals of history shall be much more objective and ruthless in judging their role than the system to which they are plugged into for reasons known to everyone. They amplified the discourse of the failure of 'the system', giving much-needed leeway to those who have knowingly imperiled the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. Instead of identifying, highlighting specific governance failures, and seeking accountability, the mainstream media is following the command of the faces behind the system as they enjoin people to 'talk positivity', 'spread positivity', etc."

Besides the story about inaccurate data on Covid deaths, the saffron shrouds on those shallow graves are obscuring another story that we in the media need to be reporting. That of immense economic distress and hunger that is leading families to abandon their loved ones in these shallow graves rather than conducting the ritual cremation. It is not difficult to imagine the extent of poverty and desperation if people cannot rustle up a few thousand rupees to buy wood and pay a priest to conduct the ritual.

A hint of this distress is coming through in some reports. But while economists will analyse the reasons for this continuing economic distress, it is for journalists to put a name and a face to it.

Last year, the migrant exodus gave us many faces to remember of the millions of people who subsist at the margins in this country. It was a story that was in your face; it could not be ignored.

This time around, there is no drama of that kind. Yet it is dramatic in its own way because it tells us that a year down the line, millions of families are broken, with no hope of finding a source of income, and little by way of government assistance to tide them over. Compounding this is their continuing invisibility in mainstream media reporting.

This story by Supriya Sharma in Scroll, for instance, paints a grim picture of what urban migrants are facing at this time in our big cities.

She writes, "If the lockdown last year came down as a hammer, this year, it feels like a thousand cuts. Obscured by the dramatic and distressing images of death in the second wave of the pandemic, a slow drip of distress is going unnoticed, not just by the government, but even by other citizens, leaving the urban poor to fend for themselves."

The migrants who left last year came back to the cities after their long trek home, only to be left high and dry once again. And this time, as Sharma records, civil society interventions appear more muted. I would argue that this has happened because their distress has been rendered invisible by the media. Without us digging out and amplifying this story, there is no hope for people living perennially on the margins to get either government aid or that from voluntary groups.

Sharma also reports on how even what the urban poor are entitled to, such as extra rations under different state and central programmes, is not available. To cover daily expenses, people are compelled to borrow money, probably at usurious rates, just to be able to buy provisions on the open market at much higher prices than they would have got if the ration shops had the supplies. The central government is failing not just on the vaccination front, it is also proving incompetent in executing the welfare programmes which have been in place for more than a year.

Anshu Gupta, founder of the organisation Goonj, also emphasises the crisis of hunger in this article in the Indian Express. He writes that last year the poor gained attention because the media reported on the exodus, but as soon as they reached their villages they were virtually forgotten. This time around, the crisis has focused on the medical emergency, on the need for oxygen and medicines. But the crisis of deepening hunger has been virtually overlooked by everyone, including the media.

Gupta writes, "It is important to understand that while the second wave is about health, it doesn’t mean that hunger is not an issue. The second wave is about ventilators and oxygen to keep people alive, but...for millions today, access to simple dal chawal is no lesser than access to oxygen.”

It is also more difficult to provide assistance this time around because with trains and buses still functioning, many migrants left voluntarily for their homes. We know now that part of the reason for the spread of the disease to rural areas was because the system of quarantining returning migrants last year was not implemented this time around. As a result, they brought back the infection. And given the dire economic crisis facing their families, there was no one around to help or record either infection or death.

This is the story those shallow graves are telling us, one that still needs to be reported.

For post-pandemic media, public health needs to be the biggest story

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on May 13, 2021

https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/05/13/for-post-pandemic-media-public-health-needs-to-be-the-biggest-story

From burning pyres and patients gasping for breath to bodies floating down the Ganga, India has been through another torrid fortnight. The whole world is now aware of the extent of the tragedy unfolding. Yet, our government continues to focus on fixing what it considers to be a "negative" narrative.

A fortnight back, when the focus of international and national media coverage was the desperate situation in New Delhi, where hospitals, private and public, were running out of oxygen and patients were dying not from the disease but from the absence of oxygen supply, we knew already that if we turned our gaze away from the cities, a much more tragic state-of-affairs was unfolding.

That is exactly what has happened. The second wave of the pandemic has inevitably, and predictably, spread to rural India and the devastation here is incalculable. This is so because there is little to no reporting, people are not being tested, not being treated when they finally reach a health facility, and dying not knowing that the "cough and fever" that afflicted them is the novel coronavirus that has already felled lakhs of other Indians.

The reports appearing in the media, mostly print and digital, remind us repeatedly that the Indian health system has not folded because of the pandemic; it was already broken. Although the sheer volume of cases has overwhelmed it even in better-served cities, in much of rural India and in small towns, the existing and abysmal health infrastructure that exists might as well not be there.

What journalists report gives us only a glimmer of the grim reality. Such as this report in the Indian Express by Amil Bhatnagar from Meerut in Uttar Pradesh. What he describes is not the situation in a remote hamlet but at the district headquarters: "A folding cot that a family claims to have got itself, fans that don’t work, a roof that is leaking at several places, and a ward overpowered by the stench of a toilet. As Meerut district climbs to the top of Covid charts in Uttar Pradesh, with 1,368 new cases taking its total active number to 13,941, its largest government coronavirus facility, Lala Lajpat Rai Memorial Medical College, is struggling to keep up."

The situation in UP has become the focus of much of the media attention. Understandably so, as despite chief minister Adityanath's threat to jail those who criticise the work of the state government, the reality cannot be hidden any more. Even members of his party are now publicly complaining about the dismal reality on the ground.

In Varanasi district, one of the four high-burden districts in the state, Jyoti Yadav from the Print reports that people are dying from "cough and fever" without realising it could be Covid because there is no testing. Her reports from Lucknow and Jaunpur tell a similar story. Every day new reports are chronicling the absence of health infrastructure and the price ordinary people are paying.

Most heartbreaking amongst these are the reports of over 700 schoolteachers who died because they had to do poll duty during the recently concluded panchayat elections in the state. This one in PARI, which gives us the full list of 540 men and 173 women teachers who died, is probably the most moving. It illustrates the utter callousness of a government more concerned about elections than the lives of its people, men and women who are also frontline workers.

And then you have hospitals that are built and widely publicised but add up to nothing. A report by Ayush Tiwari and Basant Kumar in Newslaundry describes how only 50 of the 150 oxygenated beds in a facility inaugurated with great fanfare by Baba Ramdev in Haridwar, Uttarakhand, are operational. They add: "There’s a shortage of doctors, ward boys and housekeeping staff, limiting the facility’s capacity and forcing it to refer patients elsewhere. The facility does not have proper water supply and Covid wards don’t have roofs, risking widespread transmission."

Remember Haridwar only recently hosted a "superspreader" event, the Kumbh Mela.

The situation in neighbouring Bihar is not much better. Pratyush Tripathy, writing in Scroll, illustrates with a set of maps the crisis that is waiting to explode in the state where there are no vacant ICU beds in 18 out of 38 districts. This, in a state that has the lowest Human Development Index in the country and "one doctor for 43,788 persons".

Meanwhile, the government itself has finally acknowledged that the situation in rural India is worrying with 533 districts in the country out of over 700 reporting a test positivity rate of over 10 percent. Dr Balram Bhargava, director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research, is quoted as saying, “India is facing a massive upsurge in Covid-19 cases. The national positivity rate is around 20-21 per cent, and about 42 per cent districts in the country are reporting a positivity rate more than the national average."

Just as the second wave of the pandemic had been predicted, this too should not come as a surprise. Yet, the government and its supporters continue to find ways to divert attention away from this tragic unfolding saga in rural India.

Their latest ploy is the creation of digital spaces that mimic well-known international newspapers' names, but have been specifically tasked to put forth the narrative that the government wants the world to hear. Thus, we have something called The Daily Guardian telling us how hard prime minister Narendra Modi is working to handle the pandemic, and The Australia Today accusing "vulture journalists" of spreading "more panic and despair than the pandemic".

Fortunately, or unfortunately, for the Modi government, neither the Indian nor the international media is persuaded by these deflection tactics. The stories are streaming in, from villages and small towns, and the picture they paint is not pretty. Neither can it be hidden. How long can a government go on denying this reality? How much of spin can it give when there are visuals of bodies floating down the very river it has promised to cleanse?

In fact, the government's response to the disturbing visuals of scores of corpses found floating down the Ganga and washing up in UP and Bihar illustrates its priorities. According to an ANI report, union Jal Shakti minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat reiterated, "The Modi government is committed to the cleanliness (of) 'mother' Ganga", even as he did not deny the reports about the bodies. Is that all the government is worried about, the "cleanliness" of the Ganga, at a time when in desperation people are abandoning their loved ones in the river because they cannot afford to cremate them?

The reports we have read over this last fortnight are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more stories waiting to be told even as authorities fail to count, or even acknowledge, how many people are dying from the virus. Here, one has to once again commend the determination with which the Gujarati newspaper Sandesh has persisted in counting the dead in the state and reporting the mismatch between what it has found and the government's official figures.

This report in Newslaundry from Meerut district in UP also exposes the huge discrepancy between the bodies being cremated and the official figures. In fact, the questions about the death count simply refuse to go away and will continue to haunt state and central governments. Not just journalists, but even experts such as the mathematician Murad Banaji have raised repeated questions about the accuracy of the death count. Banaji suggests in this interview to Karan Thapar on the Wire that one million Indians have already died from the virus.

Apart from the pandemic, its spread to rural India ought to remind us that the story of the grossly inadequate health infrastructure is one that has always been there.

India's health system has not crumbled only because of the pandemic. It was barely adequate at the best of times, and in many parts of rural India virtually non-existent. Today, we are being compelled to notice this and acknowledge it because of the health emergency the country faces. But each year, these areas see many such emergencies in the form of other diseases such as dengue, malaria, and encephalitis as well as perennials such as tuberculosis. In states where there is chronic malnutrition and stunting amongst children, exacerbated by the absence of medical intervention, thousands of infants die every year from something that is easily treatable, diarrhoea.

When this crisis is over, although there is no sign of it at present, we must continue to focus on this failed health system in so many parts of India. The pandemic has shown us that gloating about being an "emerging" economy means nothing when people can die from the lack of oxygen during a pandemic, or the absence of clean water at other times.

If there is one lesson we in the media can learn from this terrible year it is that the focus on public health must remain a crucial and relevant part of coverage even in non-pandemic times. As epidemiologist Chandrakant Lahariya points out in the India Forum, India would be much better placed if the government fulfilled its promises of increasing health spending to 2.5 percent of the GDP and investing more in primary health care.

The media, I believe, can play an important role in creating pressure on this and future governments by refusing to take its eye off the state of our public health infrastructure.