Window of hope, yet little changed in media accountability in Modi 3.0

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 19, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/09/19/window-of-hope-yet-little-changed-in-media-accountability-in-modi-30

Since June this year, when the general election results significantly reduced the strength of the BJP in the Lok Sabha, the optimists believed that a party dependent on its coalition partners, even if it continues to be led by Narendra Modi, would be different. That the visible authoritarian tendencies of the last decade under Modi would be tamed somewhat.

How wrong they were. After 100 days in power, there is little to indicate that there is any change in direction, even if there has been some backtracking in the face of opposition. Even if some laws, like the Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill, have been put on the backburner, there is little to suggest that the desire to control the media by this government has been set aside.

Still, these last months since June have given both the independent and mainstream media a window to pursue the kind of journalism that is so central to democracy, one that questions the powerful, that independently checks and assesses claims by those in power, and that seeks out the voices of the many who are otherwise never heard. While independent media continues to report as the media should, there is little visible change in mainstream media.

Take, for instance, the controversy over a private function at the residence of the Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud. It was a Ganesh pooja. Families that follow this custom invite close family members and friends. They usually keep the idol only for a couple of days, or five to six days at most, before they submerge it. 

Questions were rightly raised, not just by the opposition but by members of the legal fraternity about the propriety of the head of the highest court inviting the head of the executive to such a private function.

While the national newspapers gave space to differing opinions about whether the CJI ought to have invited the Prime Minister, none, barring Deccan Herald, took an editorial stand. It pointed out that “such a controversy hurts the judiciary more than the executive and could certainly have been avoided. The judiciary should not only be independent and above the fray but also seen to be so”. A reasonably mild comment, but even this was missing from the other major English-language newspapers.

Indian Express gave space for two differing points of view on its editorial pages. Senior Supreme Court lawyer Indira Jaising, in her article, asked “whether the CJI has been true to his oath of office”. Few speculated on why the Prime Minister had chosen to publicise the private event given his record of using every opportunity to be heard and seen in the media.

The criticism by the opposition did not go unnoticed. In response, the Prime Minister, as is his wont, twisted the issue and made it one of bigotry by the other side. Here is what he said, as reported in Hindustan Times:

“The Britishers followed the policy of divide and rule. They used to hate Ganesh Utsav. Ganesh Utsav is not just a festival of faith, but it played an important role in the freedom struggle. Dividing us in the name of castes was a weapon of the British. Bal Gangadhar Tilak used community celebrations to awaken the collective conscience of the country. Today, everyone participates in Ganesh Utsav without any discrimination. But its celebration has once again become a point of contention, much like it did during the British colonial era. Even today, the power-hungry people of India who are busy dividing and breaking society are having trouble with Ganesh Puja. You must have seen that the people of Congress and its ecosystem have been angry for the last few days because I participated in Ganpati Pooja.”

This ought to have been questioned by the media because Modi has cleverly confused two separate issues. The Ganesh festival is celebrated at home by many families. But during the Independence struggle, the concept of communities jointly and publicly celebrating it became a way to confront the British authorities. Today, this custom continues, and public Ganesh pandals are visited by common people and public figures, including politicians. There is nothing wrong with a prime minister and a judge visiting the same pandal. But when a prime minister visits the home of a judge, it suggests a closer relationship, one that crosses the line of propriety given the separation of powers between the judiciary and the executive in a democracy. 

Perhaps the Indian media has now become so used to not questioning that it is unrealistic to expect a change even if the June results do provide a small window. The burden for such rigorous questioning continues to fall on the small independent digital platforms that, despite their tenuous finances, turn out incisive investigative stories. An excellent example is this one by Scroll on how Indian diplomacy and the growth of Gautam Adani’s investments in countries around the world have coincided.

The state of our media has not been pinned as a major concern by any political party, whether it is in power or in the opposition. Yet, it continues to draw attention outside India.

A recent reminder is an article by the publisher of the New York Times, AD Sulzberger, in what would be considered its rival newspaper, The Washington Post. 

In a guest essay headlined “How the quiet war against press freedom could come to America”, Sulzberger writes about one political leader outside his country in these words:

“His country is a democracy, so he can’t simply close newspapers or imprison journalists. Instead, he sets about undermining independent news organisations in subtler ways – using bureaucratic tools such as tax law, broadcast licensing and government contracting. Meanwhile, he rewards news outlets that toe the party line – shoring them up with state advertising revenue, tax exemptions and other government subsidies – and helps friendly business people buy up other weakened news outlets at cut rates to turn them into government mouthpieces.”

You would not be wrong if you surmised that he was referring to Narendra Modi. In fact, this is how he described Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary. However, later in the piece, he does mention Modi, as well as the recently defeated former President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, and draws parallels between these three men and how they have curbed the media but continue to claim that they are elected leaders in a democracy.

About India, Sulzberger writes:

“In India, Modi has so successfully subverted independent reporting – blocking reports on everything from mass protests against his economic policy to mistreatment of the country’s Muslim minority – that much of the mainstream press is now derided as “godi media,” generally translated as “lapdog media.” It is wrong to imagine that this is a problem for journalists alone. The repercussions of a weakened media reverberate throughout society, masking corruption, obscuring risks to public health and safety, restricting minority rights and distorting the electoral process. Democracy itself, though still intact – as gains by opposition parties in the recent Indian election underscored – is viewed as more tenuous and conditional”.

He also speculates on what would happen to press freedom if Donald Trump is elected president of the United States on November 5. The picture he paints is dire.

I have quoted from his piece at length as it is behind a paywall and might not be accessible to readers.

The gradual degradation of press freedom acts like an anaesthetic. It numbs us to a point where what would have once been unacceptable becomes the norm. Can we still turn the clock back? This is the challenge that the Indian media faces. 

Same formats, few deep-dives: The media misses the women safety news peg again

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 5, 2024

Rape, sexual assault, harassment, women’s safety – these words have found their way to the front pages of many newspapers in the last several weeks. 

The trigger was not just the August 9 brutal rape and murder of a junior doctor at the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata. Even as the outrage and demonstrations continued in Kolkata, a path-breaking report on women working in a very different environment from that of a medical college reminded us of the challenges and dangers facing women everywhere. 

On August 19, the Justice K Hema Committee report on the Malayalam film industry, finally released after a four-year battle through courts, gives us insights into what was known in whispers but is now substantiated by hard facts and testimonies by women in the industry. It paints a dire picture of the working environment of women in this industry, where they are sexually targeted by men at every level, as actresses, as assistant directors, as make-up artists or as technicians.  The report also confirms the reasons that women do not speak up as they fear losing their jobs and see no way to get justice.

The impact of the report is still being felt, not just in Kerala but across south India. Since its release, women in the Telugu, Tamil and Kannada film industry are also demanding a similar inquiry. 

 

The impact of the report is unfolding even as I write this. Within a fortnight, several prominent men from the Malayalam film industry have resigned from their film association – the Association of Malayalam Movie Artists or AMMA. Other actors have issued strong denials after some of the women who spoke to the committee followed up by filing police complaints against specific men. 

Predictably, given the nature of the accusations, and the prominence of the men involved, the media’s response, by and large, has been to report everything stated by these men in the Malayalam film industry, including their vociferous denials as well as the charges against them.

If the reporting by the media remains at this level, the storm following the release of the report could well die down after a while. Fortunately, at least some media platforms have gone beyond the usual “he said she said” style of reporting and used the peg of the report to dive deeper into the sickness that afflicts the film world.

Here, we must appreciate the consistent reporting by an independent media platform which has reported on stories of sexual assault and harassment in the Malayalam industry for many years. The News Minute has followed the story from 2017, when a prominent actor, Dileep, was charged with having organised the kidnapping and rape of a well-known woman actor. Today, if you want details about the past, and the contents of the Hema Committee report as well as the ongoing fallout, you need look no further than The News Minute.

Apart from The News Minute, at least two mainstream English newspapers have given prominence to the report and its contents, written strong editorials, and done some follow-up stories – Indian Express and The Hindu. 

In its editorial of August 26, The Hindu argued that the Hema Committee report could be a catalyst that could encourage many more women to speak out. Indian Express placed the report within the context of sexual assaults against women over time, and rightly pointed out that the road ahead is “rutted with deep power asymmetries”. 

Apart from the editorial, Indian Express has carried several follow-up stories on the Malayalam film industry such as this one by Nikhila Henry on make-up artists.  Many of these women are faced with the hard choice of either speaking up and complaining about harassment or quitting. If they complain, they are singled out and denied work. Despite years of experience, women make-up artists have had to struggle to get recognition even from their union. 

 

Another story in Indian Express brings out the caste angle, where women from the marginalised castes face a double challenge, of their gender and their caste. 

What we cannot overlook while discussing the Hema Committee report and its impact on the film industry is that it would never have come about had it not been for the relentless campaign by a group called the Women in Cinema Collective. Comprising actors, directors, editors and others in the film industry, the WCC petitioned the Kerala state government to set up an inquiry into the working conditions of women in the industry. 

Even after the government responded and set up the committee, it took WCC more than four years through courts to finally get a redacted version of the Hema Committee report released. And as Beena Paul, the convenor of the WCC points out in this interview to Scroll, the story is not yet over. “What the report has achieved is to point out that the film industry is an unorganised, almost feudal kind of structure.”

As far as the media is concerned, this report challenges us to dig deeper into the reality of not just the film industry, but all professions where women are employed. The Kolkata rape has already led to an inquiry into the conditions under which women in medicine work – doctors, nurses and others. What about other professions, including the media?

Also, as the Hema Committee report has exposed, the problem is not restricted to the physical work conditions, and the solution does not lie in just fixing these – better toilets, surveillance cameras, transport after night shifts etc. 

The challenge is much deeper. It is the systemic misogyny that prevails in many industries which is compounded by the absence of effective redressal avenues. The Hema Committee report has broken, at least for the moment, the silence that has enveloped the treatment of women in many professions in India.

 

Beyond the outrage: Media coverage of Kolkata rape-murder case has many blind spots

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 22, 2024

Independence Day this year will be remembered not for the predictable statements made by politicians but for the images of thousands of women and men who came out on the streets of Kolkata to “Reclaim the Night”. They were protesting about the brutal rape and murder of a 31-year-old junior doctor at the RG Kar Hospital and Medical College on August 9.

Even as the story behind the brutal crime continues to unravel, with the focus now on the college administration and its responsibility for what happened, the protests that have spread beyond Kolkata remind us, yet again, about the pervasive violence that Indian women encounter in the workplace. 

Although the outrage over the rape and murder has received wide media coverage and would have contributed to the Supreme Court stepping in and taking suo motu cognisance of it, there are several questions about how media handles sexual assaults that must be asked.

Predictably, proximity and relevance to a media market continue to determine what sexual crimes get detailed coverage. Rapes and assaults in cities, where the media and its urban “market” are based, determine the extent of coverage. We have seen this in the past, and this holds true today. 

An illustration is the perfunctory reporting on the rape and murder of a nurse working at a private hospital in Uttarakhand. She was assaulted and killed on July 30, but the crime was known only after her body was found on August 8. Till today, we know nothing more about this crime.  

When politics is added to the brew, coverage by the media is assured. And this is precisely what has happened in Kolkata, where parties opposing Mamata Banerjee’s state government have used it as an opportunity to attack her and demand her resignation. This politicisation of a horrendous sexual crime detracts from what I consider to be the central issue: the continuing vulnerability of women to sexual assault despite changes in the law. 

Some in the media have compared the Kolkata rape and the widespread outrage and countrywide protests that have followed in its wake to the December 2012 gang-rape of a young woman in Delhi. Then too, there were demonstrations across India with demands for justice. Then too, opposition parties joined the protestors. And then too, a woman politician, Sheila Dixit of the Congress party, who was the Chief Minister of Delhi, was the focus of public anger. 

In 2012, the print media and television channels played an important role in amplifying the voices of the protestors. As a result, the central government, helmed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, was compelled to set up a committee, headed by Justice JS Verma, to look again at the laws related to rape and suggest changes. 

 

The report was ready in a month, and by 2013, the UPA government passed the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013. The new law incorporated some, but not all, of the suggestions made by the Verma Committee and added the death penalty for rape, something the Verma Committee had opposed. The government also allocated funds to set up one-stop centres that would come to the aid of victims of sexual crimes.

Despite this, and the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, Kolkata is an ugly reminder that little has changed. 

In 2012, the media followed the law that requires us not to publish the name or give any hints of the identity of the rape victim or survivor. To get around this, several pseudonyms were chosen. In the end, Nirbhaya stuck, and that is the name that the government and the media continue to use when referring to the victim of the 2012 Delhi gang-rape. 

That rule continues to be followed by established media. But unlike 2012, when print and electronic dominated the mediascape, today we face a new reality: the internet and social media. It is now so pervasive that it is gradually becoming the dominant source of news for a growing number of Indians with smartphones. 

To know what’s happening, people do not depend on established media anymore.

The impact of this change is evident when something like the Kolkata rape incident takes place. Within hours, the social media space was overwhelmed with rumour and speculation. Despite the law that prohibits the identity of the victim being revealed, the young doctor’s name and photograph were being liberally circulated. What is worse, within days, her photograph reportedly also appeared on porn websites with details of the assault. 

In these circumstances, the task of sifting fact from fiction becomes even more difficult for journalists reporting on this case. The obfuscation by the hospital authorities has added additional hurdles in obtaining verified information. And the conflicting narratives put out by the warring political groups have only added to the confusion. 

Meanwhile, social media is swirling with rumours and conspiracy theories that are rapidly disseminated. One such rumour was that the mob that attacked the protestors and damaged the premises of the hospital on the night of August 15 also destroyed evidence of the rape and murder. While the mob attack was frightening, with videos clearly showing the absence of any resistance from the local police, the damage done did not include the room where the rape and murder took place as this report by AltNews clarifies. This is just one illustration of the problem that journalists reporting on this must face every day. 

The real tragedy of the shifting focus of media reporting, which is now on the hospital authorities and their inaction, is that the central issue of the safety of women professionals at the workplace has become almost incidental. The protestors have not forgotten and continue to highlight it. But the media’s gaze has shifted. 

For instance, there have been hardly any reports on the conditions under which women doctors work in government hospitals across India. Or, for that matter, women in any other profession. The stories would be similar – lack of basic facilities, the absence of redressal methods to deal with sexual harassment, the lack of safety, particularly when they are required to work at night, among others.  

An exception was the Hindustan Times, where reporters spoke to junior doctors in five locations across the country. The picture that emerged was familiar. Over the years, there have been several instances, such as during the Covid pandemic, for instance, when the work conditions of junior doctors came into focus. 

The BBC also reported on their conditions and reminded us of the case of Aruna Shanbaug, a nurse at Mumbai’s KEM hospital, who was raped and almost strangled with a bicycle chain by a contract worker in 1973. She survived, but only just. She was left in a vegetative state, and nothing could be done as Indian law does not permit active euthanasia. After 42 years, she died on May 18, 2015. 

We also read little or nothing to make readers understand that the justice system continues to fail women despite changes in the law initiated after the 2012 Delhi gang-rape. 

In 2012, because of the huge outcry and public pressure, the case was fast tracked, and the six men (including a minor) were apprehended and charged. By September 2013, the five adults were convicted and given the death sentence. The minor was given a three-year sentence in a juvenile correctional facility. Finally, on March 20, 2020, after they had exhausted all their avenues of appeal, four of the convicts were hanged. One had died in police custody in 2013. 

Today, there are literally thousands of cases that have not moved forward. Jyoti Yadav of Print has followed the 1992 gang-rape of a minor in Ajmer and reported on how the survivor has had to struggle to pursue the case. Finally, in August this year, after 32 years, the six men charged with the crime were convicted and sentenced to life.

Or take the more recent case of the Dalit woman who was gang-raped at Hathras in Uttar Pradesh four years ago and died thereafter. The story had drawn media attention, especially the way she was hastily cremated despite her family’s objections. A rare follow-up is this report by Nidhi Suresh in Newslaundry that illustrates the endless struggle of the family to get justice.

A noticeable difference visible in print media since August 9 is the way reports on rapes are now given greater prominence. These incidents would have been reported, but probably as minor stories, that in media jargon are called “crime briefs”. In the last few weeks, many such reports are more visible – a gang-rape here, a nurse raped in a hospital, minors sexually assaulted by school staff, among others. But the trend is unlikely to continue before other “breaking news” demands more space and time.  

One of the most insightful videos after the Kolkata rape case is this interview with lawyer Vrinda Grover in The News Minute, where she gives us a much-needed perspective on the criminal justice system and its failure. She reminds us that it is not the absence of law that affects women, but the way it is implemented, or rather not implemented. It is the justice system that has continued to fail all women, and particularly marginalised women who have no voice.

 

In Hindenburg fallout, serious questions cordoned off by the media’s noise

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 14, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/08/14/in-hindenburg-fallout-serious-questions-cordoned-off-by-the-medias-noise

The Modi government is lucky. The latest bombshell from Hindenburg Research landed in India a day after the budget session of parliament had concluded. Had it come a couple of days earlier, one can just imagine the scenes in both houses of parliament, given that the name “Adani”, mentioned by anyone in the opposition, is like a red rag for this government. 

It will be recalled that we first heard about US-based Hindenburg Research when it broke a major story in January 2023 about the Adani group of companies. It claimed that after two years of research it had evidence to show that “Indian conglomerate Adani Group has engaged in a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades”. The expose shook up the financial markets in India and it is estimated that the Adani Group lost $150 billion. 

In the weeks that followed these sensational revelations, in response to a petition, the Supreme Court asked the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to investigate the veracity of the accusations made in the Hindenburg report. More than a year later, the investigation has still not been completed despite the court setting a deadline for March 2024. 

It is against this background that the latest report by Hindenburg, made public on August 10 must be viewed. The group has raised serious questions about the current chairperson of SEBI, Madhabi Puri Buch, and suggested the possibility of a conflict of interest in relation to the ongoing investigation into the Adani affair. 

How has the Indian media covered this latest development?

The story is not straightforward. To independently verify the Hindenburg revelations would require media houses to invest time and money to investigate each accusation and ascertain whether there was any truth in them.

It is still early days and perhaps some media house will walk that distance.

However, so far, the English print media, including the business papers, have stuck to reporting the gist of the Hindenburg revelations. Some gave it prominence on the first day, that is August 11. Others buried the story on the inside pages. For instance, while Indian Express and Times of India, as well as Telegraph, ran the story prominently on their front pages, The Hindu and Hindustan Times buried it on an inside page.  

In subsequent days, Indian Express has been the most active in following the story, continuing to give it a prominent position on its front pages, and doing a detailed explainer.  Some of the business papers have also done explainers. These are essential for lay readers who would not understand the intricacies of the financial world. 

The SEBI chairperson, and her husband Dhaval Buch, who has also been named by Hindenburg, issued a detailed statement that was carried by all media. SEBIissued a statement clearing the chairperson. And the press also reported the government’s response which was that it had nothing more to add to SEBI’s statement. 

However, even as all these statements were reported without any questions being asked, a couple of newspapers did raise some tentative doubts. 

For instance, both Hindustan Times and Mint, which belong to the same group, suggested in their editorials that in the “public interest” perhaps the Adani matter should be “taken over by sleuths other than Sebi’s”. They did not, however, suggest that the chairperson should step down.

The Financial Express did just that. In its editorial on August 12, it wrote: “Given the latest round of serious allegations before, it will be in the interest of India’s financial markets, the regulator, and Buch herself that the Supreme Court sets up a separate panel to take over the investigations into the Adani fiasco. Till the panel report is out, the Sebi chairman should recuse herself from this case. Such an action will only enhance the reputation and integrity of the country’s capital markets.”

On August 14, The Hindu also called for the SEBI chairperson to step down in its editorial.

Much of the rest of the coverage consisted of what the media like to call the “slugfest” between the opposition, which is demanding a JPC inquiry and the resignation of the SEBI chairperson, and the BJP which suspects that the controversy has been deliberately created to undermine India’s image. The loquacious Ravi Shankar Prasad led the way by typically bringing in the BJP’s favourite whipping horse, American philanthropist George Soros.

The serious questions being asked, and the first tentative investigations, have appeared in independent media platforms. Sucheta Dalal, whose expose of the stock market scam in 1992 still stands out as one of the best investigative stories done by a business journalist, asks tough questions in this piece in Moneylife 

She asks, for instance: “SEBI’s response, issued late on a Sunday night, is particularly disappointing. It claims to address issues that ‘warrant an appropriate response.’ However, when serious allegations are made against the chairperson and the regulator itself, an ‘appropriate response’ cannot be anonymous. It should come from those in a position to speak for the regulator – which is either the board of directors or the finance ministry. Was there a board meeting? Who has assumed responsibility for statements made in the press release?”

These are questions that other media organisations should also have asked but did not. 

Both Scroll and Wire have done reports checking the veracity of some of the statements made by the SEBI chairperson in response to the Hindenburg report. So even if parliament is not in session, and the opposition is unable to maintain a head of steam on this controversy, questions about conflict of interest in SEBI, the veracity of the Hindenburg revelations last year and now, and the health of our regulatory agencies will continue to be asked. 

Moving away from financial markets that interest a small percentage of Indian citizens, there is other dirt that is waiting for the media to dig up, literally. And that is on the state of India’s major cities. 

In this rainy season, almost every major city is drowning, their drains or what passes off for a drainage system, unable to cope with excess rains. Our cities are neither “smart”, as the Modi government promised, nor anywhere near a “global” standard despite the fancy airports, that also leak, and so-called “world class” highways that become moonscapes of potholes after a heavy downpour. 

While we write about urban infrastructure above the ground, stories that are often just refurbished press releases, the media needs to take a closer look at what lies beneath the city. 

On July 27, after three young people drowned in a basement in Delhi, the question of drainage systems appeared on the horizon momentarily. These three were not doing anything risky. They were sitting in a studying room, in one of the many centres that prepare those trying for competitive exams to enter the civil service, or to get into engineering or medical colleges. When the skies opened, and the drains overflowed, the basement flooded and these three drowned. It was a tragedy that ought to be a wakeup call not just for city planners and administrators, but for the media. 

Unfortunately, civic reporting has been downgraded to stories on such disasters. What we need are “drain inspectors”, journalists who understand the crucial infrastructure needed to make cities liveable for all and to persist in asking questions and reporting before disaster strikes.  

There was a time in Mumbai, where the acronym BRIMSTOWAD, which stood for Brihanmumbai Storm Water Disposal System, appeared regularly in the city papers. We read stories about the city’s 100-year-old drainage system and the urgent need for investment to repair and add to it so that the perennial monsoon flooding was avoided. Such reporting has virtually vanished. 

In the meantime, most of our cities continue to depend on ancient drainage systems and see little to no investment in making this “world class” even as densities increase, open areas are paved to prevent the natural absorption of excess rain, and the roads are in permanent gridlock. 

What is worse, despite all the talk about becoming a developed country, almost every day there are sickening stories of men who are lowered to clean these drains manually and die as they inhale the noxious fumes trapped inside – stories like this one in Scroll. India must be one of the few countries in the world that aspires to conquer space but cannot invent machines to replace people for such hazardous but essential work. 

More ‘politics’, less meaning: In mainstream media’s ivory towers, an incomplete budget story

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on July 25, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/07/25/more-politics-less-meaning-in-mainstream-medias-ivory-towers-an-incomplete-budget-story

Once again, Sansad TV, giving live feeds from the ongoing budget session of parliament, trumps other television channels in providing engaging coverage. 

Although reports of the debate over the union budget appear in the next day’s newspapers, they do not capture the diversity of interventions in the house, often by first time MPs. And this time, with an invigorated opposition, there is a robustness to the debate compared to the last decade.

Yet, as media, we must ask whether we have settled into a predictable groove in covering the budget, albeit with entertaining graphics and learned commentary from experts and others. Are we making enough of an effort to reach out to large sections of the population for whom the entire exercise probably has little relevance?

In the 1980s, when I worked with the Delhi edition of a national daily, and before the advent of multiple private TV channels and social media, the vox popconsisted of the reporter stepping out and speaking to the chaiwala outside the office and the workers at the local dhaba frequented by many journalists who worked in newspaper offices located on that street.  

Clearly, this was not representative of what poor people thought, but at least an effort was made to go beyond industry big-wigs and economists to assess what the man – and it was always a man – on the street thought.

At a time of unaddressed unemployment, of economic distress, of the struggle of so many poor people in our cities and countryside to keep their heads above water, surely there is a need to know whether they even know about the budget, whether they care, and if they do know, whether they believe it will make any material difference to their lives.

Also, in a time when we are becoming aware that legacy media, that is print media, and even the mainstream TV channels are not the primary sources of news for a growing number of people, especially the young, it would be useful to know whether they care about the budget, whether they even know what the exercise is about, and whether they think it makes any difference to their lives.  

In the absence of such reporting, entertaining as are the interventions in parliament in the budget debate – and I might add the rather predictable behaviour of Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla who continues to find fault with interventions by the opposition – the story remains incomplete. The union budget is a political exercise, but it also has real life impacts on ordinary people. As media consumers, we need to know and understand what these are.

While the budget session will continue to dominate the news for some time, the understandable media focus on it has overshadowed one of the most important stories reported in the last fortnight.

On July 18, Indian Express carried a front page story about a man called Rahim Ali from Assam.  Rahim Ali fought a 12-year battle to contest the ruling of a Foreigners’ Tribunal in Assam that declared he was not an Indian. The family appealed to the Gauhati High Court but got no relief. Finally, on July 11, the Supreme Court, where the case was pending, declared that Rahim Ali was, in fact, an Indian and the tribunal was at fault for determining his legitimate claim to citizenship by focussing on minor discrepancies in the documents he had presented.

The heart-stopping moment, as you read the story, was to be told that Rahim Ali was already dead. He had died more than two years before the judgement, a broken man unable to face the consequences of the tribunal’s ruling.

As Indian Express wrote in an editorial the next day:

“Ali’s story, at once tragic and absurd, is symbolic of the promises not kept in the fundamental social contract between citizen and state, enshrined in the Constitution’s letter and spirit. Ali’s wife, Hajera Bibi, on learning of the Court’s verdict, told this newspaper: ‘What is the point now? The fear that he lived under, of being taken away, died with him. If they still wanted to call him a foreigner, what would they have done? Picked him up from his grave?’ The question, steeped in sadness and anger, is a reproach. It is also a call for accountability from an opaque and labyrinthine process that casts the onus of proving their innocence on the vulnerable.”

The Express editorial also quotes the shocking official figures released by the Assam government in February of the number of people declared non-citizens by 100 tribunals – 1,59,353 – and the cases that are still pending, 94,149. And it rightly asks: “How many of the 1,59,353 have been unfairly stripped of their citizenship like Rahim Ali? For how long, and by what justification, will the nearly 1 lakh people whose cases are pending live under the Sword of Damocles?” 

That “opaque and labyrinthine process” that the editorial speaks of has been at work for many years in Assam. It drew some media attention in the early years, but as with many stories that are part of a process, and not an event, it slipped off the radar. 

There are surely many more like Rahim Ali, who continue to struggle against an arbitrary system that randomly picks up people and demands that they prove their citizenship. On a visit to Assam in 2019, I met some of these people. All of them carried plastic bags full of documents, their faces creased with anxiety as they did not know how to convince the tribunal that they were legitimate citizens of this country and not “illegal”.

The Rahim Ali story ought to prompt a renewed media focus on the process of weeding out so-called “illegal immigrants” in Assam, an issue that continues to be raked up by the current BJP government in the state. For years, civil society groups working on the ground have been crying themselves hoarse trying to attract media, and political attention, to the ongoing injustice being played out in the state. But the attention is sporadic, not sustained.

For those interested in learning more about this issue, do listen to this in-depth interview with Aman Wadud, a young lawyer who has been pursuing these cases, by LiveLaw. He explains the extent to which this process of determining citizenship is unfair and penalises the poor in Assam. He suggests that the Rahim Ali judgement should be read widely to understand how an Indian citizen can be declared a non-citizen.