HUMAN RIGHTS OF OVER 90% OF THE COUNTRY IS CRUSHED BY THE MEDIA
M.A.SIRAJ,JOURNALIST, FEATURE AND NEWS ALLIANCE (FANA),DELHI
Whither the “national” press: Can the media act against the will of its masters? This is a big question that has cropped up during the last two years- an era when India witnessed certain grave crises notably the eruption of Mandir-Masjid row and the reservation issues.
Some traits of the Indian society are recognisable. It is a segmented society which betrays a hierarchy in matters of social, political and economic privileges. It is a society short of resources which fosters an intense struggle between the haves and the have-nots. It is a society of religious people who despise bigotry. It is a society which rejects extremism and gradually renders the roughest of ideologies innocuous. It is basically a secular society where the majority itself has inherent checks against turning majoritarian.
The press in India has been ignoring several of these realities and has contributed significantly to the creation of a mess – ideological, political and social. But, more than this, it has impaired its own credibility in the eyes of the masses, inasmuch as people have begun to associate the press with ideologies, political groupings and caste interest. If the Mandir-Masjid controversy tested the communal leanings of the press, the anti-reservation stir etched to relief its casteist hues. Result: a great majority of readers now question the credentials of the press to speak for the “nation”, “national interest”, equality and social justice. It must set off alarm bells for the entire press – which will be a loser as a whole – if bit by bit the entire press comes to be associated with sectarian interests.
Double standards: Here are a few parallels to gauge the role of the press in India. Banning of the Satanic Verses raised a storm in the country. The thrust of the uproar was to present the “Muslim minority” as the villain of the freedom of expression. But, one could question as to why the banning of India Today in Maharashtra did not provoke a similar censure in the country and the so-called crusaders of freedom avoided making statements on the quiet surrender of the govt. (by banning a popular fortnightly) in the face of blandishments by a fascist outfit, merely because the hero of the history it held in esteem was referred to abusively by a noted columnist.
Ameena case: Ameena’s awakward marriage burst on the headlines during August last. The newspapers poured out their pet theories of “backwardness” of Muslim women. But their point of concern was not the Muslim women. The state of women after all cannot be any different from the men of that community. The target of insinuation was the Muslim personal law. In its zeal the journalists walked up to the dusty lanes of Barkas, the old Arab settlement of Hyderabad, and brought out the entire trade in brides. But thousands of child marriages in Rajasthan, dowry deaths, and human sacrifices to deities, are never attributed to the ethos of the religion they emanate from. While in the forner case the press’ eagerness to put the Muslims and Islam in dock was palpable, in the latter case the crimes were attributed to individuals, not their ethos of faith.
A “noted” jurist opines that the Ayodhya dispute is beyond the jurisdiction of the court. The very contradiction in the opinion does not qualify for a controvery in the press. But a call for boycott of the Republic Day function on Jan. 26 kicks up a “nation-wide debate”. Aligarh death: Three Hindi dailies from Agra fabricate news of death of 76 non-Muslims in the AMU Medical College Hospital. The fictitious report provokes program of innocents the next day in Aligarh. No conscience is stirred. The Press Council asks the editors to retract the calumny, but the dailies flout the fiat.
At other places the bias has been subtle, and the desired effect gets into the reader’s mind unconsciously, by twisting the facts, or by putting them in wrong context, or by placing emphasis at the insignificant aspect. Consider the following items of news:
(i) “Two sadhus lynched by residents of a locality near Chhota Imambara in Lucknow.” The hoary monument had been employed here to identify the community.
(ii) Eight passengers of Gomti Express were killed by students of Dharma Samaj College before the train entered the Aligarh junction during Nov. 1990. Seven of them were Muslim. One of them, Srivastava, a Kayastha railway official of Kanpur, was also killed by the marauders due to mistaken identity. The agency reported only Srivastava’s name among those killed. The newspaper readers were misled into believing that the killers were Muslim and those killed from majority community.
(iii) Imam Abdullah Bukhari clarified in his press conference that his call to people (not Muslims alone) to vote for a particular party was not a fatwa because he was no mufti, it was only an appeal. It was invariably reported as a fatwa.
Choice of terminology: The choice of terminology is vital in shaping attitudes of the target audience. Between 1981 and 1990, our press has been using “Punjab terrorists” or “Sikh terrorists” and “Tamil militants”, while the two situations were not dissimilar. “Terrorists” evokes hatred. The “militant” is a glamourised term with a halo of heroism around it, and evokes sympathy. The Tamils were, therefore, pampered on the Indian soil. They ran radio stations, carried out bombing of Madras Airport and indulged in all sorts of crimes. We tolerated, and finally gave them money to sign the Sri Lanka Accord. It was only after the induction of IPKF that we discovered their real nature. Perhaps all this could have been averted, had we treated them simply as “terrorists” who were as abominable as elsewhere.
Role of a Madras daily: In this connection, the role of a prominent Madras daily has been most disastrous. Now the result is before us: we lost one prime minister each in both imbroglios festering in the two regions.
Afghans fighting for their country’s freedom from Soviet occupation forces – which forced one-third of their population to flee their homes and seek shelter in Iran and Pakistan – were called “Afghan rebels”. This prepares us for the foreign policy that our country adopted towards the Afghanistan imbroglio, while the media need not toe the official line. Did not the arrival of 60 lakh refugees from East Pakistan impel us to go whole hog for the freedom of the hapless nation?
Anti-Mandal agitation: The Indian press exposed its caste bias brazenly during the anti-reservation stir in 1990. The implementation of the Mandal had put only 40,000 central govt. jobs at stake for the upper castes. But the press-the representative of the privileged classes-blew up the sucides by a few misguided youth out of proportions by spreading falsehoods and half- truths. The various editorials held it “ruinous for the nation”. The newspapers ignored those reports where “victims of self-immolation” alleged killing by setting them on fire by colleagues.
A detailed study by a Delhi journalist has more graphically brought out the pro-upper caste bias in coverage of anti-reservation agitation by comparing the column-centimeters devoted by three “national” English dailies to communal riots in the wake of L.K. Advani’s Rath Yatra claiming 400 lives, and the anti- reservation agitation causing about two dozen deaths (mostly self-inflicted ones).
Media bias: Between the middle of August, when the agitation was beginning to move into top gear, and the end of September, the Indian Express (New Delhi edition) devoted 1,915 col-cms of front-page space to news reports on the disturbances. Within the same interval of time, 3,311 col-cms of the front page were used exclusively for the projection of the agitation. The Times of India (New Delhi) was only marginally behind, devoting 1,554 col-cms on front page and 3,229 col cm off it to the student rampage. Only the Hindu (New Delhi edition), – with its alleged reputation for sobriety and moderation and with relative unconcern of a newspaper headquartered in the South, chose to devote to the agitation less than half the space that the other two major “national” dailies in the English language did individually.
Havoc of “Express” and “Times”: Both the Indian Express and the Times of India were lavish in their visual coverage of the agitation too-in both cases the total space allotted came very close to print coverage. However, in the Hindu’s scale of priorities, the movement merited no more than a quarter of the visual space that the other two dailies devoted to it. In terms of editorial space, however, all the three dailies were roughly comparable.
The editorial tone was inflammatory in the case of both the Indian Express and the Times of India. The indian Express urged the students fomenting the trouble to fulfil “their responsibility to spread and intensity” (IE, editorial, Aug. 18, 1990). In both their silence and their emphasis, the Indian Express and the Times of India had begun to display a tendentiousness that did little to advance their claim to speak on behalf of the “nation”. A comparison between the dailies’ coverage of communal rioting and their coverage of anti- reservation agitation may serve to highlight the issue involved. A comparable period of 47 days of coverage could be taken.
The results are interesting. Between Oct. and Nov. 1989, when the communal riots sparked off by the brick-worship rituals claimed over 300 lives, the Indian Express devoted to these killings 610 col-cms of space on its front-page and 458 col-cms off the frontpage. The picture in terms of visual coverage was abysmal-50 col-cms on front-page and 50 col-cms off front-page. The Times of India despite its tall editorial rhetoric on the scourge of communalism, actually lagged behind alloting a mere 536 col-cms on front-page and 329 off front-page to news coverage of the riots. In terms of visual coverage, however, it could claim a slight advantage over the Indian Express. Though the Hindu lagged behind both the other papers in terms of aggregate coverage, it had markedly high proportion of total coverage on the front-page. Visually, however, it devoted no more than 70 col-cms-and that too entirely on inner pages.
In arriving at a relative scale of values, a reasonable- if somewhat conservative-assumption may be made that the impact of visual coverage is twice as great as that of print coverage. We then find that the Indian Express devoted 12.81 times as much space to the anti-reservation agitation as it did to the communal riots of Oct-Nov ., ’89. The corresponding ratio for the Times of India would work out to 9.81, while for the Hindu it would work out to a somewhat more human 5.75.
In defence of varnashram: When these ratios are further weighted for the number of lives lost-which was six times higher in the case of communal riots-then one is led to the piquant conclusion that a life lost in the defence of the divinely ordained varna sharam dharma is several times more than a life that has had to be snuffed out in the case of building a shrine to a mythological figure. Only the scale of valuation varies, from over 75 times in the case of the India Express to about 60 times in the case of the Times of India and about 35 times in the case of the Hindu.
Conclusion: The print media has shown itself to be insensitive to the loss of human life, except if it is an upper-caste urbanite who is involved. The Hindu- Muslim animosity is in some senses taken for granted by them. The continuing blood-letting in communal riots does not occasion the kind of hysterical handwriting, and elicit the same kind of rhetoric about the “nation” being divided, as does the spectacle of Hindu upper caste urbanite coming out in the streets to challenge the state.
Press ownership: A sharper conclusion is that the press power, concentrated in a few hands of the privileged castes and classes, does not feel bothered by comunalism as it serves to reinforce the “national” identity. A “national” minority comes handy as the target. But it feels frustrated when Mandal Commission cleaves the imagined monolithic “national ” identity and exposes the grievous inequities that the development strategy has been perpetuating. And when it challenges the elite dominance of a narrow upper-caste minority-both substantively and ideologically.
Destructive role: It is here that we must understand the destrictive role of the media, especially the print media. All its rhetoric of social justice, secularism and fairplay holds good till the privileged castes and classes do not feel their position threatened. The social churning in the last two years has exposed the media’s narrow social base and political vision. It is time we think of new elements of a “national” identity and shaping a truly representative media.
