From Bilkis Bano to Zakia Jafri, the media needs to ‘keep the pot boiling’

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 25, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/08/25/from-bilkis-bano-to-zakia-jafri-the-media-needs-to-keep-the-pot-boiling

August 15, 2022 will be remembered. Not for the flag-waving or declarations made by the prime minister from the Red Fort, but for the fact that, on this day marking 75 years of India’s independence, 11 men convicted of a heinous crime were granted remission from their life sentences.

Even as the prime minister spoke of women’s safety and empowerment, his home state of Gujarat released these 11 men from Godhra sub-jail. The crime for which they were convicted is horrific, even in the retelling today. Worse still, the survivor, Bilkis Bano, is now condemned to relive it. Yet, as these men emerged from jail, they were greeted with sweets and garlands by members of the prime minister’s party, the BJP.

The Bilkis Bano case is one that should never be forgotten. Soon after dark on February 28, 2002, a five-months pregnant Bilkis, 21, and members of her family left their village of Randhikpur in Dahod district. They hid in fields, hoping to escape mobs that had descended on the village following the Godhra train burning the previous day.

But they could not escape. On March 3, a group of 20 to 30 men carrying swords and sickles assaulted them. They raped Bilkis, her mother, and three other women; and killed her three-year-old daughter Saleha and most of the others in the group of 17. Only three, including Bilkis, survived.

The fact that we remember this case is because it is emblematic of the horrific communal violence that took place in Gujarat, where Muslim women were the targets of the most repulsive acts of sexual violence and assault.

We remember it, but not because the media continued to report it. Some journalists did persist but after 2019, when the Supreme Court asked the Gujarat government to pay Rs 50 lakh compensation to Bilkis, the media lost interest. The only reason it is still remembered is because of this woman’s singular courage and determination to continue her fight for justice with support from civil society organisations.

For the media, the Bilkis case holds out several lessons.

We remember it, but not because the media continued to report it. The only reason it is still remembered is because of this woman’s singular courage and determination to continue her fight for justice with support from civil society organisations.

We have to remember that today, there is an entire generation that has grown up since the Gujarat communal carnage of 2002. They would not have known about Bilkis or the other atrocities during that period. Thus, the significance of this particular case, and the context in which it took place, bears repeating.

If this story had been left to television channels, we would have heard a lot of noise but very little by way of factual background or context. Barring exceptions like NDTV, mainstream TV did not give the recent release of the convicts the attention it deserves. As a result, the significance of what has happened in the context of today’s communal politics, and the historical details that are essential to understand this, would have been lost to most consumers of mainstream media.

Fortunately, the print media in India is not yet extinct and hopefully will continue to survive. Mainstream newspapers, or at least the English papers I looked at, did provide explanatory stories to fill in details that many would either not have known or forgotten. It is interesting that so many mainstream newspapers are now doing explanatory journalism – it seems that there is a demand for this that is unfulfilled by reporting and commentary.

More importantly, newspapers also reported not just what Bilkis and her husband Yakub Rasool felt, but also the response of now retired Bombay High Court judge UD Salvi, who gave the original ruling in 2008 against these men. Justice Salvi also spoke to several television channels and independent YouTube channels, like Barkha Dutt’s Mojo Story. He was clear and unequivocal in all these interviews, stating as he does in this report in Indian Express, that “if it is being said that they are innocent, they did not commit the crimes and hence they are being honoured, it is defaming the judiciary which gave the judgments convicting them”.

There were also disturbing follow-up stories that need to be noted for the record. For instance, Indian Express reported on how the released convicts had been out on parole several times while serving their sentences. Several people living in Randhikpur, who had testified in the Bilkis case, had filed police complaints of being harassed and intimidated by these men during those periods when they were out on parole.

...if it is being said that they are innocent, they did not commit the crimes and hence they are being honoured, it is defaming the judiciary which gave the judgments convicting them.

Justice UD Salvi to the Indian Express

Even more disturbing is this Indian Express report about Muslim families leaving Randhikpur and seeking shelter in a relief camp in Devgarh Baria, where Bilkis Bano and her family have been living since 2017. One of the women arriving at the camp said, “None of us has the kind of courage that Bilkis has shown in the past two decades to fight. On our way here, we came across a huge convoy of the ruling party near Kesharpura and were petrified. I held on to my daughter tight.”

Clearly, this is a story that has not yet ended, not just in terms of legal challenges to the release of the convicts but also the renewed fear in Muslims in a state that is heading for an election. For them, the memories of 2002 have not faded.

Surveys have suggested that editorials in newspapers are not widely read. Yet they are important as a record of the stand a newspaper takes on a particular issue. In this instance, both Indian Express and the Hindu carried strong editorials on the release of the convicts and their subsequent felicitation by members of the BJP and its affiliate organisations. The editorial in the Hindu concluded: “With an Assembly election due in Gujarat at the end of the year, it is difficult not to read political significance into this decision. The sight of the released convicts being greeted and feted on their release will not sit easy on the country’s conscience.”

The other lesson for the media is the importance of memory, of reporters recalling what they reported. For instance, one of those who diligently covered Bilkis Bano’s case, when it was shifted at the behest of the Supreme Court from Gujarat to Maharashtra, is senior journalist Jyoti Punwani. She was able to remind us that the attitude towards these 11 convicts even in 2008, when they were sentenced to life imprisonment, was no different to what it is today. She writes in the Deccan Herald:

“It's not the first time these men, who gang-raped women and killed 14 innocents, including Bilkis Bano’s infant daughter, are being honoured. The day they were sentenced to life in Mumbai in 2008, this reporter saw people touch their feet in the trial court. The courtroom was packed with villagers from Randhikpur, the mood overwhelmingly sympathetic to the guilty. Snide remarks were made against the alleged ‘bounty’ given to Bilkis (there was none). Even others present in court for unrelated matters muttered that shifting the case from Gujarat to Mumbai was a ‘conspiracy against Hindus’. One of those sentenced even declared that he’d done what he had ‘for God’, and that it was ‘a crime in Hindustan’ to belong to the Vishva Hindu Parishad.”

The Supreme Court, in its judgement in the Zakia Jafri case challenging the findings of a special investigative team into the attack on Gulberg Society in which Jafri’s husband was killed, used the phrase “keeping the pot boiling” while referring to those who helped Jafri. As we now know, that particular ruling resulted in human rights activist Teesta Setalvad and former senior police officer RB Sreekumar being taken into judicial custody. Their bail hearing is before the Supreme Court.

I would argue that it is the job of the media to “keep the pot boiling” on issues like the communal carnage in Gujarat in 2002, the continuing attacks on Dalits and minorities in many parts of the country, the human rights violations in Kashmir and the Northeast, and much more. If the media does not do this kind of follow-up, the memory of these atrocities will fade and ultimately disappear, especially when the justice system also often fails.

 

In times of ‘breaking news’, a reminder that good journalism needs patience

 Broken News

August 11, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/08/11/in-times-of-breaking-news-a-reminder-that-good-journalism-needs-patience

There was a time, at least in print media, when reporters were encouraged to find what were called “good news” stories. These days, if you find one, it is entirely accidental. Even so, it is a relief to read something other than stories of political shenanigans, murders and rapes and the spread of communal poison.

The story of how a seven-year-old girl, who went missing in Mumbai in 2013, was finally found early this month is one that was a most welcome change.

In 2013, Mumbai newspapers had reported that on January 22, Pooja left home with her brother to go to school but never came back. She was the 166th girl to go missing as recorded in just one police station. By 2015, 165 had been located. But one remained, as reported in this detailed feature in Indian Express by Smita Nair.

After nine years and seven months, Pooja, now 16 years old, was reunited with her family. She had been lured and kidnapped by a childless couple living in the same area. After they had their own child, the couple sent her away to work with a family just 500 metres from her home, confident that in this period people would have forgotten about her.

In May, Deccan Herald reported on the number of missing children in India. The official figures are probably an underestimate given that reporting is not universal. But they are worrying nonetheless. According to this report: “As per the latest figures of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 59,262 children went missing in India in 2020. With 48,972 children remaining untraced from the previous years, the total number of missing children has gone up to 1,08,234.”

Every story around a missing child contains drama and pathos, more so if the child is a girl. There is always the fear that she could have been kidnapped and trafficked. She could be lost. She might have been taken in by some kind strangers who then decided to adopt her. One reads many such stories.

Yet this story of Pooja has another angle, about a policeman who wouldn’t give up. Rajendra Dhondy Bhosale – a former assistant sub-inspector from Mumbai’s DN Nagar police station, where Pooja’s case was registered – made it his personal mission to try and find her. He did this while he was still in the force, and then continued even after he retired in 2015.

It is also a story about journalism and persistence. What we would not have known is the fact that Bhosale persisted and never gave up. And the reporter, Smita Nair, who with difficulty won his confidence after he retired and persuaded him to talk to her for the 2015 article, kept in touch with him all these years, as she narrates in this podcast. As a result, she was in a position to tell the backstory of this indefatigable ex-policeman.

I mention this particular story because it is a reminder of the many aspects of journalism that are being forgotten in a time of “breaking news” and the push for exclusives.

Good stories require patience. They also need journalists to persist, and to learn to listen, even if what they are being told appears irrelevant to the story they are working on. It is often some irrelevant detail, or the behaviour of a person not central to a story, that leads you to something important.

Unfortunately, few media organisations grant reporters the time to do this. Often, reporters have to pursue stories without any assurance that they will be able to write them for the publications for which they work. For independent journalists, without the backing of a media house, it is even more challenging. Yet the most memorable stories are most often those done by journalists who have these qualities.

These are the journalists who “document the unseen”, a phrase used in a recent talk by Supreme Court Justice DY Chandrachud. Speaking at the Convocation of the OP Jindal Global University, he said, “In the age of fake news and disinformation, we need journalists more than ever to document the unseen and expose the fault lines in our society.”

One of the stories that mainstream media continues not to see is that of Kashmir, or rather only to see and report it partially. By and large, we only read what the government wants us to know about Kashmir such as encounters with militants, or the many apparent achievements of the administration. But is that all there is to report from this region?

Much has been written, including in this column, about how the media has been hollowed out in Kashmir, reducing its once independent media to a virtual cut-and-paste job of government handouts. Forcing independent journalists to either leave the region, or report only for publications outside India and that too at considerable risk. Placing many journalists on a no-fly list without informing them, thereby denying them the right to travel for work. And continuing to imprison journalists whose crime is that they were reporting what the authorities would prefer remain unrecorded.

One could not avoid noticing that on August 5, the third anniversary of the abrogation of Article 370, there was precious little in the print media on Kashmir barring a couple of edit page articles. Most surprising was the Indian Expressrunning a comment piece by the Lt Governor of Kashmir Manoj Sinha as its lead article, with nothing else to balance it. If anything tells us how far mainstream media has travelled in these last years, it is this. Indian Express used to have one of the best bureaus in Kashmir with journalists like Muzamil Jaleel writing incisive reports on developments there. Such reporting has practically disappeared from its pages and is also missing in the rest of mainstream media.

Let me end with this quote from an acerbic piece by Sankarshan Thakur in the Telegraph. He writes about why journalists want access to those in power but what it has to come to mean these days:

“On the face of it, access to those who wield power, those who take the big decisions that impact the people this way or that, is what most good journalists should aspire to. Information, remember, is ammunition. But that is not how access has come to work. It is an invitation to the charmed circle of power, but dog-collared with the omerta pledge, non-compliance to silence will bring consequences...Access no longer allows a journalist information, quite the contrary. Access purchases a journalist’s silence. It’s not remotely an exaggeration to suggest that the journalist is now being accessed by the power establishment than the other way around.”

In fact, the coverage of Kashmir, or the lack of it, is a reflection of precisely this. Thakur argues that Kashmir, or issues to do with minorities are “a handy litmus test” to determine whether media is “anti-national”. On Kashmir, mainstream media passes with flying colours because it has chosen not to “document the unseen”.

Now that an Adivasi is president, will Big Media finally report on Adivasi issues?

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on July 28, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/07/28/now-that-an-adivasi-is-president-will-big-media-finally-report-on-adivasi-issues

On July 25, when Droupadi Murmu took the oath of office as India’s 15th president, not only did she become the first Adivasi and the youngest person to hold this office, but she also introduced India to the Adivasi greeting “Johar”.

In the run-up to Murmu’s election and after, we have read reams about her life as a Santhal in Odisha, that she is a graduate who worked in the irrigation department of the Odisha government, that she was also a teacher. We also know her name was “Puti Tudu” but later changed after several iterations to Droupadi. And now, thanks to her, more people are aware that the traditional greeting amongst India’s estimated 104 million Adivasis is “Johar”, which means “salutation and welcome”.

Yet, even as there was celebration at her election, how many people in this country really know about the lives of different Adivasi tribes? Or whether they have seen any significant change in their lives in the last decades, or the challenges they face to survive as the lands they called their own are being snatched away for so-called “development”?

A few days before Murmu’s election, we read about 120 Adivasi men in Chhattisgarh being released after five years in prison. They had been implicated in an exchange between security forces and Maoists in Burkapal on April 24, 2017 in which 25 Central Reserve Police Force personnel were killed and seven injured. Subsequently, the police rounded up men from Burkapal and surrounding villages and charged them with the crime. After waiting five years in jail, a court ruled that there was no evidence to prove their involvement.

The media has reported the acquittal as well as some reports about the individual men, what they face, their anxieties about the future, and what they want to rebuild their lives. But it is not enough. A story like this ought to have been on the front page. It also deserves detailed follow-up. Readers need to get a sense of the area where these men lived, and if and how they can reconstruct their lives.

Every now and then, similar stories are reported – of people incarcerated for years without trial and eventually acquitted. But rarely is there any outrage in the mainstream media, or demands for accountability from the police and the system that allows this to happen, especially when poor people are involved.

Sudha Bharadwaj, the lawyer who has worked in Chhattisgarh for decades and is currently out on bail after being implicated in the Bhima Koregaon case, writes that this particular acquittal is “more the norm than the exception”. She quotes from a study by the Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group, or JagLAG, of cases between 2005 and 2012 in the Dantewada sessions court. The average rate of acquittal was 95.7 percent.

The group also found that while undertrials in other states spend, on average, around one year in jail, in Jagdalpur, it was one to five years. One of the reasons for this was the inability of jailed Adivasis to get adequate legal support. JagLAG, a group that did provide such support, was hounded out of Bastar.

Apart from Bastar, which comes into view whenever there is a so-called “encounter” between security forces and Maoists, there are struggles being waged by Adivasi groups in many other parts of the country, including Murmu’s home state of Odisha. Remember the extraordinary campaign by the Dongria Kondh tribe in Niyamgiri against the bauxite mine of the powerful business house Vedanta? Despite their success, their problems have not ended yet. Similar struggles continue in Jharkhand where local communities are challenging either infrastructure or the release of their lands for mining. Yet there is little written about these struggles except in alternative or non-mainstream media.

Murmu’s election provides an opportunity, and a challenge, for the media to dig deeper into the environment from which she emerged. The average Indian reader/viewer has little to no knowledge about Adivasis, their varied cultures, religions and beliefs, and how far development programmes have made a difference to their lives.

Interestingly, some platforms are using this “news peg”, so to speak, of an Adivasi woman becoming president of India, to probe some of these questions.

One of the more interesting pieces was this one in Scroll. It recounts the experiences of Adivasi women who come to Mumbai looking for work. They end up working as domestic help in middle class homes where they are paid next to nothing, much less than the minimum wage. They sleep in kitchens. Sometimes they are given no choice but to share the same space as male employees. They often go to bed hungry because of how little they are given to eat. And, of course, there is no concept of time off.

These women are hired because they are willing to work for wages much lower than what locals accept. In many parts of Mumbai, for instance, domestic workers are organised. Even where they are not formally organised, they have informal systems where they decide the minimum they are prepared to accept to do certain jobs. These Adivasi women are outside such arrangements and, therefore, open to the worst forms of exploitation.

The story is wrenching. It speaks, above all, to the callousness of India’s middle class that, even today, in this 21st century, can treat human beings as nothing more than slaves. Domestic labour remains one of those dark, and not hidden, realities of India’s cities.

Perhaps it is wishful thinking to hope that these subjects will be covered, given that the mainstream media caters only to its “market”. Thus, stories about poverty, deprivation or even the environment can only find space if they are linked to a disaster or, if momentarily, the poor speak up for their rights and the very size of their protests cannot be ignored. Unfortunately, even the presence of an Adivasi woman in Rashtrapati Bhavan is unlikely to change this.

So, can we describe India’s media as “free" if it is the market that governs content? We must ask this given how often there are either boasts about press freedom in India, or promises made internationally about respecting it, or reflections about the need for “independent journalism”.

The latest to publicly reflect on this is the Chief Justice of India, NV Ramana. Speaking in New Delhi recently, he was reported as saying:

“Independent journalism is the backbone of democracy. Journalists are the eyes and the ears of people. It is the responsibility of media to present facts. Media must confine itself to honest journalism without using it as a tool to expand its influence and business interests.”

He also added: “When a media house has other business interests, it becomes vulnerable to external pressures. Often, the business interests prevail over the spirit of independent journalism. As a result, democracy gets compromised.”

No one will argue with Justice Ramana that journalists must present facts, or that the media should “confine itself to honest journalism”.

The question today is, how?

How can any media do this given the ownership structure of the media?

How can any media do this given the power the State has to intimidate media houses through their business interests?

How, given the latest Supreme Court ruling on the Prevention of Money Laundering Act and the enhanced powers of the Enforcement Directorate, can any media house attempting to be “independent” or even “honest” survive in a regime where such laws and the ED have been weaponised to deal with all kinds of dissidence?

And finally how, when even those “independent” journalists who are doing their jobs of gathering facts and reporting them are either arrested, as in the recent case of Mohammed Zubair and earlier Siddique Kappan or Kashmiri journalists Asif Sultan, Fahad Shah and Sajad Gul? Or they are stopped from pursuing their professional commitments, as in the recent case of Aakash Hassan, a Kashmiri journalist stopped from going on a reporting assignment to Sri Lanka, and earlier the Pulitzer prize winning Kashmiri photographer Sana Irshad Mattoo, who was not permitted to board a flight to Paris without being given any reason.

These are questions that perhaps the Chief Justice should address, given his concern of an independent media and its importance as the “backbone of democracy”. 

Why did India's media ignore Wired story on police planting evidence against Bhima Koregaon activists?

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on July 14, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/07/14/why-did-indias-media-ignore-wired-story-on-police-planting-evidence-against-bhima-koregaon-activists

News is always “breaking" and stories are sometimes “broken”. But then you also have important stories that are “broken” but are quickly forgotten. Not always deliberately, although sometimes that is the case. Quite often because there is just too much news breaking all around us, genuine and fake. As a result, many important stories that need to be followed up are relegated to the archives.

Meanwhile, those doing the essential task of sifting the fake from the real, like AltNews cofounder Mohammed Zubair, are arrested and treated like criminals. More on that later.

But first to an important investigative story that got barely reported in the Indian media.

I refer to the remarkable story broken by the Wired magazine on June 16. Headlined “Police linked to hacking campaign to frame Indian activists”, the story describes in some detail how the Indian police were able to plant evidence on the computers of some activists that ultimately led to their arrest. This is in reference to the 16 individuals – now 15 after the death of Father Stan Swamy last year – who have been in jail for over three years without trial in the Bhima Koregaon case.

A year ago, a story in the Washington Post had also revealed how evidence was planted on the computers of Rona Wilson and Surendra Gadling, both in jail in the Bhima Koregaon case.

Now, one of the companies investigating this, SentinelOne, has released the startling finding that the hackers who broke into the phones and laptops of the activists did so on the directions of none other than the Pune police, the very people who had announced the “conspiracy” for which the BK 16 were picked up and incarcerated.

Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade, a security researcher at the company, is quoted in the Wired article as saying, “There’s a provable connection between individuals who arrested these folks and the individuals who planted the evidence.” Although the company has identified the Pune police official linked to the hacking, it hasn’t made their details public yet. It is expected to do so at the Black Hat security conference, slated to be held in Las Vegas, United States, in August.

Such a story ought to have triggered a major response from the Indian media. After all, it was reported not by an unknown media organisation, but by a well-respected tech magazine.

Surprisingly, barring a few newspapers like the Telegraph and the Hindustan Times that reported on the investigation, the news was largely ignored by the Indian media with the exception of independent digital news platforms. As a result, this explosive story, establishing a nexus between law enforcement agencies and their actions that result in sending people who have broken no law to jail, has virtually sunk without a trace.

Why is it important even now, in addition to its obvious relevance to the Bhima Koregaon case? Because if the representatives of the state, namely the police, can use such tactics with such ease in this case, how do we know the next time an activist or a journalist is arrested, and their phones and laptops are “seized”, that the same won’t happen?

Take the case of Zubair. He was arrested on June 27 for a tweet posted in 2018 that contained a picture from a 1983 film by the renowned director Hrishikesh Mukherjee. Not only was he detained on these flimsy grounds, but his electronic devices were picked up from his home in Bengaluru.

In the meantime, multiple FIRs were filed against him in different locations forcing him and his lawyers to rush from court to court fighting for his right to get bail. In the Supreme Court, even as his lawyer argued Zubair’s bail plea in another case filed in Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, who was representing the UP government opposing the bail plea, was reported as saying that Zubair was part of a “syndicate”. This remark is more than just a hint that before long there could be a “conspiracy" in which Zubair would be implicated.

Zubair’s "crime" was that he was doing journalism: sifting fact from fiction. But in this “new India”, journalists should not be doing this. Their job is not just to be loyal stenographers taking down the official narrative and repeating it, but enthusiastic promoters of it, irrespective of whether what they are reporting has any basis in fact.

Zubair’s case is further complicated because he happens to be a Muslim in a country where, increasingly, no Muslim, educated or unlettered, can feel safe anymore. Not even a person as highly respected as the former vice president Hamid Ansari.

At least AltNews and Zubair are well-known. They have a profile on social media. The work they are doing is talked about. And his case has garnered support in India and abroad.

There are, however, hundreds of journalists, many who are not even recognised as journalists by the very media organisations for whom they report, whose fate is even more fraught, and largely unknown.

That is the other story that ought to have drawn more attention but did not in these times of shrinking attention spans. It is a long and detailed story, one that most readers usually do not make the time to read. But it ought to be read if we really want to understand what is happening to the press, and to journalists, in this country.

I recommend this detailed and excellent report by Arunabh Saikia in Scrollabout a bunch of journalists in Uttar Pradesh and what they went through after they broke an important story.

The region where these journalists work is known for many different things, including widespread and open cheating during examinations. Three of them exposed this by getting hold of the papers that had been leaked. For this, instead of being applauded, they were arrested and sent to jail for several weeks. What is worse, the media organisations for which they reported, widely circulated Hindi papers Amar Ujala and Rashtriya Sahara, did not acknowledge their work, nor did they initially stand by them when they were arrested.

Furthermore, many of these journalists are not formally on the payroll of the newspapers using their stories. They are hived off into separate organisations so that the newspaper does not have to pay them the salary they are required to do on the scale set by pay commissions. In this case, one of them was paid Rs 450 per month and another Rs 500, less than the minimum wage paid to a labourer.

Clearly, what this story exposes about the conditions under which these journalists work in UP is not an exception. A little bit of digging would reveal that this is virtually the norm in smaller towns, places where journalists supply the gritty details so essential for well-reported stories. In 2007, Sevanti Ninan wrote a book recording the experiences of such journalists in Headlines from the Heartland. I suspect not much has changed since.

So freedom of the press involves not just freedom for journalists to do their work, and not be locked up like Zubair and earlier Siddique Kappan, Fahad Shah, Aasif Sultan, Sajad Gul and others. It also consists of journalists being recognised as professionals, paid a decent wage, and supported when they end up being jailed for no other crime than doing journalism.

 

No justice for the poor in India

For more than 20 years, Srinath Yadav has sold bananas and other fruit on this pavement in Mumbai’s posh Malabar Hill.  He also sleeps in the same spot where his table with the fruit sits during the day.  He is from Allahabad district in UP, where his family depends on the little he makes in a day.

 

Twelve days ago, when Maharashtra got a new government, Yadav lost his place of work and the spot where he sleeps.  It is his misfortune that the new chief minister of the state, Eknath Shinde, decided to move into the bungalow across the road from his stall.

Without so much as a by-your-leave, Yadav was pushed out, to the corner of the pavement (marked out in the photograph below) while the police and multiple police vans park along the road, blocking access to the pavement.  And huge hoardings, with the new chief minister’s face adorning them, block the “Jungle Book” paintings on the wall which marks the children’s park on the other side.

 

India’s media is under siege, but what will it take for the public to care?

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on May 11, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/05/11/indias-media-is-under-siege-but-what-will-it-take-for-the-public-to-care

Do ordinary people really care about press freedom? Or is this just an elitist concern, although the elite in this country would not exert themselves to defend this particular freedom?

The question pops up periodically whenever there is a discussion on the state of the media in India.

According to the latest World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, one journalist has been killed and 13 are in prison in India since January 2022. Many more work under the stress of death threats, surveillance and fighting innumerable court cases filed against them. In any country that claims to be a democracy, this does not indicate that there is complete press freedom. In fact, quite to the contrary.

This is precisely what the RSF ranking has shown – a steady decline in India’s ranking out of 180 countries surveyed. From 133 in 2016 to 142 in 2021 and 150 now, India’s fall has been quite precipitous.

The government, of course, will not accept this. Predictably, it sees all such reports as a conspiracy to defame India and sully its reputation as a shining example of democratic and press freedoms.

But it only has to look in the mirror to realise that the situation is far from “shining”. On the contrary, it gets murkier every day. On one side journalists who question, report and unearth realities are hounded, charged and sometimes even killed. On the other, you have the majority of the Indian media choosing to be an echo chamber of this government, repeating and amplifying everything it is told to do, or even when it is not explicitly told to do so.

Despite 75 years as an elected democracy, it is striking how the idea of a free press, or the absence of one, does not stir too many in the electorate. It would appear that the media really does not make much of a difference to the lives of ordinary people. Or perhaps it indicates our changed times, where what circulates on social media has more currency than news that is reported in the media.

But despite this indifference of the voting public, it goes without saying that without a free press, much of what is happening in this country would go unreported.

Yet, take the instance of the reporting during the two years of the Covid-19 pandemic in India. Especially during the second wave, at least some media, particularly independent digital news platforms, did report the devastating tragedy of lakhs of people dying on the way to hospitals, gasping for air without oxygen supply, and then being buried in shallow graves or simply thrown in the Ganga. Despite this, people did not connect what had happened to mismanagement by the central and state governments. Why?

According to Shoaib Daniyal of Scroll, the main reason voters failed to connect the daily human tragedies that played out during the second wave of the pandemic last year to the government’s mismanagement of the crisis was because of a “lack of media critique”.

He rightly points out: “Throughout the pandemic, big media houses – especially Hindi and English-languages outlets based in the National Capital Region – chose to avoid blaming the government for both the economic losses as well as the healthcare collapse. Instead, Covid-19 was portrayed as a global act of god that had affected each and every country in much the same way. Very few news reports made it to the mainstream Hindi and English media showing government malfunction or the fact that India was one of the worst-hit countries.”

If mainstream media had reported truthfully about the way the pandemic played out in the lives of people, would voters have made different choices in the elections that followed?

Looking back, there was a time when this did happen. In 1975, when Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency, press freedom went into hibernation. It only came out of it in January 1977, when the emergency was lifted before the March general election.

The media used the window between the end of the emergency and the election to expose the gross violations of the rights of poor people, particularly through the mass and forcible sterilisation campaigns and the demolitions of urban poor settlements. Indira Gandhi’s image as someone who cared for the poor was seriously dented. “Garibi hatao” had turned into “Garib hatao”. And it was the poor who voted wholeheartedly against her and the Congress party, leading to political change.

Given the state of the Indian media today, it is highly unlikely that its reporting on issues – like the “bulldozer injustice” story, for instance – will trigger political change. This story is being covered because it is happening in the national capital where most media houses are headquartered. There would have been little to no coverage had this kind of violation of the rights of poor people occurred in a remoter location. In any case, every day there are similar and even starker violations that take place in the rest of the country that are never reported.

Also telling is the fact that when the RSF report was released on May 3, which is designated as World Press Freedom Day, hardly any of the major media houses, or even print newspapers, chose to comment on it apart from carrying reports on its contents. It would appear that even we in the media don’t really care how free we are.

Krishna Prasad, former editor of Outlook, posted on Twitter under his media critique handle @churumuri that not even one English language newspaper out of 16 surveyed, or 15 Indian language papers in 22 states, bothered to comment on India’s ranking in the World Press Freedom Index. Only independent digital news platforms like Scroll and the Wire brought home the real significance of this report, as this strong editorial in the Wire sets out clearly and forcefully.

It concludes with these words: “The time for mincing words has long passed: India’s democracy is dying in bright daylight. And yet, this death is not inevitable. The press is under siege but must find ways to stand its ground, chronicle what is unfolding and raise its voice in solidarity with every journalist and media house in the firing line.”

The media is under siege in India and many journalists are literally on the firing line. But they are being killed or incapacitated in different ways, not just by bullets or beatings.

Let me end with the story of a rural journalist in Uttar Pradesh – Pawan Jaiswal. In 2019, the UP government charged him with conspiracy to defame the government because he made a film showing children in a Mirzapur village eating salt with their rotis as their midday meal. The midday meal scheme was conceived to ensure that the poorest children get at least one nutritious meal a day.

Jaiswal was doing what journalists are supposed to do – record and report the reality, often ugly and distressing, that unfolds daily in many parts of this country. But in the eyes of the UP government, this was a crime for which he had to be punished.

Tragically, Jaiswal died last week of cancer, a disease for which he did not earn enough as a rural journalist to get adequate treatment.

No one killed Jaiswal. But a system that criminalises journalists who are doing their jobs, and pays them so little that they can barely survive, is responsible for his death.

Lawbreakers, not quite citizens: ‘Bulldozer’ reportage shows how little India cares for urban poor

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on April 28, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/04/28/lawbreakers-not-quite-citizens-bulldozer-reportage-shows-how-little-india-cares-for-urban-poor

Predictably, Jahangirpuri has slipped off the radar. The high drama of April 20, as excavators – or bulldozers, in popular parlance – razed homes, shops, walls, gates, food carts, awnings, and temporary and permanent structures has ended, at least for the moment, as we await the verdict of the Supreme Court of India.

But in the court of popular opinion, as determined by the tone and substance of the media coverage of Jahangirpuri, the verdict has already been delivered. And it reads: “The state has the right to use force to deal with ‘illegals’ and ‘encroachers’, and to punish those suspected of rioting, even if there is no proof.”

The other message, barely hidden, is that this is what awaits Muslims who so much as dare to raise their heads, even if a few Hindus also suffer as collateral damage.

Television news in this country has already fallen so low that it is hard to imagine it could go lower. But it has and it did, on April 20. There are no words to describe the craven, callous and gross coverage of the brutal actions by the municipal authorities in Delhi that not only rendered people homeless and crushed their sources of livelihood, but also sent out a frightening message to lakhs of others like them.

Instead of showing an iota of sensitivity, a section of TV journalists shouted, climbed onto bulldozers, and remained in perpetual exclamation mode as they recorded the mayhem. To get a glimpse of this, take time to watch this edition of TV Newsance by Newslaundry. It will illustrate better than any words what television news has been reduced to in this country. To term it farcical would be a gross understatement.

The behaviour of some TV reporters and anchors on April 20 has also underlined how far the media, and many journalists, have travelled from the concepts that undergird the role of the media in a democracy. Our job is not to kick people who are already crushed by poverty and unemployment; it is to hold to account the people with power. On April 20, we did just the opposite.

Apart from the basic message that the demolitions at Jahangirpuri, as well as in Madhya Pradesh’s Khargone and in Gujarat, seek to send out, there is a backstory that also needs to be understood and addressed by the media.

Our job is not to kick people who are already crushed by poverty and unemployment; it is to hold to account the people with power. On April 20, we did just the opposite.

This is the egregious ways in which governments, and city authorities, constantly use and misuse laws against the urban poor.

I live in the city of Mumbai where an estimated 50 percent of the population lives in semi-permanent housing. In the eyes of the authorities, some of these settlements are “encroachments” on land marked for other purposes, even if that purpose has remained unfulfilled for decades.

As a result, the sword of demolition hangs over the heads of lakhs of poor people who continue to find work and survive in this so-called Maximum City.

The reality, of course, is that in Mumbai, even the very minimum by way of basic services is not provided to close to half the population.

A recent study prepared under the Mumbai Climate Action Plan noted that 41.7 percent of the city's population uses community toilets. A toilet in every home is still a distant dream. Many of these so-called community toilets are in such poor condition as to be unusable. Children often squat on the open land in front or behind the toilets. Old people are compelled to use the open drains running past their homes, as even in many of the settled, or "regularised" slums, there is no sewerage system. And increasingly, people are building toilets inside their tiny houses and the waste is being flushed out into open drains that run through these settlements.

This is the state of affairs in India's richest city.

If you are a reporter based in any Indian city, the urban poor are a reality who cannot be wished away. They are driven to cities because they have no means of livelihood in their villages. And many have lived decades in impermanent housing, even on pavements, or alongside railway lines, because even if they found work, they could not find a place to live.

These settlements of the urban poor have a history, linked to migration but also to demolition. Jahangirpuri, for instance, was designated to resettle people pushed out from the heart of Delhi in efforts by the Indira Gandhi government to “beautify” the national capital. That term has increasingly come to mean that you either hide the poor, or send them far away so that urban poverty is invisiblised.

The people who were settled in Jahangirpuri in the 1970s were given small plots on which they were expected to construct their shelters. These people had originally come to Delhi from UP, Bihar, Rajasthan and West Bengal. Over time, as with most other similar settlements, tin and tarpaulin were replaced with brick and mortar, and pucca houses coexisted with temporary structures – all under the benign eye of the authorities.

Yet, this history of the place, and understanding of what it was and how and why it is what it is today, was largely missing from the reporting on Jahangirpuri. We read about events on the day of the demolition, the loss to so many families, and the desperation with which people tried to save their belongings. But for people living outside Delhi, it was hard to understand where this place is, how it was established, and who were the people who lived there.

For the majority of viewers of television, however, the story was complete on that day itself. The municipal authorities had acted, they had removed encroachments and illegality, and they had sent a powerful message to those who think they can get away with violating the law. Laughable as that is in this country, where respect for the law is the lowest amongst the powerful and the well-heeled, it is this distorted narrative that is being pushed by much of the media.

We have seen this happen in the past in many cities. In Mumbai, for instance, demolitions were almost a daily occurrence in some parts of the city, particularly after the 1970s. Newspapers would report these demolitions, but we also read about “slum dwellers and citizens”, as if these were two mutually exclusive categories. Such reporting perpetuated the belief that anyone living in a slum was an “illegal” and that the municipality was right in demolishing such slums.

In Mumbai, demolitions were almost a daily occurrence in some parts of the city, particularly after the 1970s. Newspapers would report these demolitions, but we also read about “slum dwellers and citizens”, as if these were two mutually exclusive categories.

In 1981, at the height of the Mumbai monsoon, the then chief minister of Maharashtra, AR Antulay, conducted a demolition drive against pavement dwellers and slum dwellers that is memorable for its callousness. In response, journalist Olga Tellis and others filed a case in the Supreme Court arguing that even the poor were guaranteed the right to life and livelihood like any other citizen of India and that their shelters could not be demolished without notice and without giving them an alternative. The judgement in the case, delivered in 1985 by a constitution bench, has much in it that is relevant even today.

The court held that pavement dwellers should not be treated as trespassers. “The encroachments committed by these persons are involuntary acts in the sense that those acts are compelled by inevitable circumstances and are not guided by choice.”

Today, this kind of understanding of the reality of the lives of the urban poor is missing, not only amongst the class that does not have to fear loss of shelter, but also in much of the media. As a result, you get reports depicting the poor not only as lawbreakers but also their settlements as eyesores that need to be cleared out to “beautify” our cities.

In the three decades and more since the Olga Tellis ruling, attitudes towards the urban poor have hardly changed. You realise this if you revisit the 1984 documentary Bombay, Our City by Anand Patwardhan. It could have been made in the India of today.

The reporting on Jahangirpuri reminds us yet again how the media “discovers” poor and marginalised people only when something dramatic happens, such as a demolition. They forget that for the urban poor, the very process of survival, as Patwardhan's film so graphically portrays, is a daily drama. These are the stories we ought to be recording and reporting, rather than waiting for their lives to be literally crushed under a bulldozer.

In Modi's 'new India', the bulldozer replaces the justice system

 In the light of the callous actions of the BJP-led municipal corporation on North Delhi, where on the morning on April 20, seven bulldozers accompanied by more than 1000 policemen went on a destruction spree in Jahangirpuri in Delhi, I was reminded of similar events in my city of Mumbai. 

In Delhi, under full media glare, the municipal bulldozers destroyed handcarts, shops, workshops, awnings, the gate to a Masjid and much more.  Crucially, they destroyed the lives of poor people.

Despite the intervention of the Supreme Court ordering them to stop and maintain the status quo, they continued for well over an hour.  The result was a tragic tale that is all too familiar to anyone living in a city in India: arbitrary demolition of homes, shops, sources of livelihood of the poor and often Muslims, with no notice and no chance to find a solution.

Living as I do, in Mumbai, I have followed and written about the lives of the urban poor for decades.  Just to jog my own memory, I am pasting below some of the columns and articles I have written.

The first is from my colum The Other Half, that I wrote for over 30 years, first in Indian Express and thereafter in The Hindu. It was in response to a statement made by Shiv Sena supremo, the late Bal Thackeray,  that Mumbai was not an "orphange" that could accommodate poor people from other parts of India. At that time, one of the main planks of the Sena was the anti-outsider campaign, singling out people from Bihar and UP, without acknowledging that many of these people had lived for decades in Mumbai, worked here, and that this was the only home they knew.

This was also the time the Shiv Sena government in Maharashtra had launched a scheme to rehouse some slumdwellers, only those considered "legal", that is those that had been documented in a survey conducted in 1976.  The large numbers outside this list were "illegal", especially the pavement dwellers, and hence not entitled to an alternative if they were cleared off the pavements, as they were. In the course of time, the "cut-off" date for legality was extended from 1976, to 1980, 1985 and finally to 2000.

As a result, many of the women I write about did finally get a pucca house in a slum redevelopment building.  They could negotiate with the authorities because they were organised.  Others in similar circumstances did not fare as well. Over the last two decades or so, a large number of slums have been redeveloped and poor people have got housing.  But the numbers of the homeless remain virtually unchanged, and pavement slums and so-called "illegal" settlements still exist, on side roads, on patches of low-lying lands, away from the view of visitors to the city. The stories of the people who continue to live like this even today are not very different from Sameena, Madina, Sakina or Kusum. 

The difference between what happened in Jahangirpuri on April 20, and demolitions in Mumbai in the past is that here they were not used to selectively target one community.  The poor were considered to be a problem because they came in the way of infrasturcture or use of land they were squatting on for some other purpose (like building a shopping mall!)  A few times, the bogey of "illegal Bangladeshis" was used by the Shiv Sena to demolish slums where Bengali-speaking mostly Muslim migrants lived.  But never so blatant as what happened in Delhi, and the weeks before this in Khargone, MP and even earlier in UP, during the first term of UP Chief Minister Yogi Adiyanath, otherwise known as "Bulldozer Baba".

*****************************************************************

From the archives

 

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, April 2, 1995

 

The Other Half

 

An open letter to Balasaheb

 

Dear Sir,

 

My name is Seema, or it could be Sakina, or Sameena or Madina or Kusum.  My actual name is immaterial.  I am not trying to hide my identity but as there are so many who are like me, and who feel the same way I do, my acual name is of no consequence.

 

I am writing this letter because I am told that you have declared that Bombay -- Mumbai -- is not an "orphanage" and that it cannot afford to hold out a welcome to other like me.  Why, Sir, do you compare this city to an orphanage and people like us to orphans?

 

I came here 30 years ago from Madhubani in Bihar.  We were a family of weavers but most of us had no work.  We heard that Bombay was a city where the poorest of the poor could earn enough to survive.  So, without ever having stepped outside my village, I caught a train to Bombay.

 

When we arrived here, we were overwhelmed.  The city was huge -- I had never in my life seen such a big place.  It was also frightening at first.  But soon we found that we were not alone.  There were many more like us who had come here for the first time.

 

Although we did not know a soul, we settled down on a patch of pavement and began looking for work.  After some days, we were pleased to discover that there were many others from our district who had also come to Bombay.  Gradually, some of us congregated in the same area.  We have lived there ever since.

 

Every now and then, the municipality comes with its demolition squads to clear us out.  But after extracting some money from us and stealing some our things, they leave us alone.  So we rebuild our shelters and continue our lives.

 

I can think of many terms to use to describe this city, but an orphanage?  No, Sir, Bombay is not an orphanage.  In an orphanage, the children have a roof over their heads and are given food, free of charge, to eat.  Some of them are even adopted by kind-hearted rich people.

 

We, who came here several decades ago, have still not got a roof over our heads and there is certainly no one who gives us free food.  Nor has anyone adopted us. We pay for everything.

 

We have survived because we must, there is no other option.  We sleep wherever we find a vacant space, on a pavement, on the railway platform, in a park, on a empty disused plot of land, along the railway tracks, anywhere.  Today, this little space, where a grown person cannot stand upright, is our only home.  We dream of better days to come but wonder if they will come within our lifetime, or even that of our children.

 

In this place which you call an orphanage, few people have bothered to find out how we survive.  We live by our wits.  Our men, even today, earn a daily wage pushing haathgadis (handcarts) or loading and unloading goods at the different bunders (docks).  We women spend the first three hours of every day, from 4.30 a.m. hunting for water.  Will we get it from the fire-hydrant today, or from a person living in a pucca chawl, or from a hand-drawn water tanker?  After having begged for water, we get on with the day's work -- cleaning other people's houses, cooking food for them, washing their clothes (we usually do not have enough water to wash our own every day), taking care of their children, and whenever there is a moment to spare, doing piece rate work at home to earn a little more.  Our day's work never ends.

 

With what we earn from these multitude of jobs, we have fed ourselves and our children.  It is not a luxurious existence by any standards.  But it is far better than the life we left behind.  Now we hear that you will not permit our jaatwaalas from our village to join us if they are in trouble.  Why?

 

Tell us, in what way are we a burden to the city? Have we demanded free houses? We pay for water.  In fact, we are told that those of us who live on pavements pay up to 20 times as much as those who live in pucca buildings and get a running supply of filtered municipal water.  We also pay each time we use a toilet.  Nothing comes free to us.

 

We hear that you have promised that you will build 40 lakh houses and give them free to people living in slums.  You are worried that such a scheme will lead to people "pouring in" from other states.  You are quoted as having said, "Where will they live and eat and what about hygiene? It could trigger an epidemic. Life here will become miserable."

 

But life is already miserable for millions of people in Bombay, yet all of them live and eat and there are no major epidemics.  It is not a way of life that we would recommend.  But despite such promises, none of us who live like this seriously believe that we will ever be "given" decent houses, free of charge.  Life in this city has taught us to listen to everyone but to believe only what experience has taught us. And if we have no such illusions, why should our brethren back in our home states?  Rest assured, Sir, they will not come pouring in to Bombay even if you do succeed in building some houses and giving them free to a chosen few.

 

In fact, all we want is the right to live.  We are constantly told, specially before elections, that every person living in this country, man or woman, rich or poor, has equal rights.  Yet, now it appears that only the rich have rights.  No one tells them not to move from one city to another in search of better opportunity.  But if we do the same, we are compared to orphans and told we must stay where we are and starve rather than strive for a better life. Is this fair? Or are we not entitled to ask even that question?