For 45 days now Orissa’s Kandhamal district has been gripped by
acts of violent terror with 52 persons being massacred and thousands of homes
being burnt. Over 1,00,000 tribals, poor and destitute, live in the state’s
relief camps and even with the Central Reserve Police Force stationed there
‘Hindu’ terror has not been curtailed. What has prevented the ‘secular’ union
government from imposing Article 356 to dismiss the state government and from
banning the outfits that generate terror, the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad?
Attacks on Christians have now spread to Karnataka, Madhya
Pradesh, Delhi, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. This violence once again highlights the
huge chasm that lies between constitutional guarantees and the ugly reality on
the ground. Who can blame India’s minorities – Muslims, Christians, Sikhs – for
drawing the conclusion from bloody experience that the promise of equality
before law, equal protection of law, due process and rule of law made in the
Indian Constitution are nothing more than paper promises?
The continuing attacks on Christians in different parts of the
country, and their reportage, raise yet another question about the role of the
media in testing times. The Orissa editions of the national dailies, for
instance, have been doing a fair job of honest reporting from about a week since
the violence first erupted. But reportage on the same issue in other major city
editions of the same dailies remained patchy until recently when the unceasing
murder and mayhem unleashed by the Bajrang Dal made it impossible to ignore any
longer.
For several years now our media has, among other things, been
pursuing a policy of regionalisation (some say localisation) of news to lend a
different flavour to each edition. Be that as it may, we must ask ourselves
whether human rights violations should also be treated as local or regional
concerns.
In the worst moments of our recent communal history – the
demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, the pogrom against Mumbai’s
Muslims in December 1992-January 1993, the Gujarat genocide in 2002 – when the
very idea of India seemed to be on the blink, the national media, which was
ineffectual during the build-up to mass violence, ignoring the consequences of
hate propaganda that led to violence, redeemed itself once violence actually
broke out.
During the state-sponsored carnage in Gujarat in 2002, even as
images of the charred remains of the 59 victims tragically killed in the fire on
coach S-6 of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra on February 27, 2002 took
precedence over ghastly images of brutalised human beings in the post-Godhra
carnage, it was the chilling reports in the print media and television news
coverage that galvanised the National Human Rights Commission and the Editors
Guild to rush to Gujarat to investigate and provide their own damning accounts
of Hindutva’s frenzy. Diplomatic missions dispatched reports to their own
governments as a result of which chief minister Narendra Modi still cannot get a
US visa and the European Union continues to treat him as an untouchable.
That was then. With blast after blast targeting innocent
citizens in city after city of India in recent months, things seem dramatically
different. Now that the ‘nation in danger’ alert has been sounded the media in
general and the electronic media in particular seem content to relay the
spontaneous speculations of the police and other security agencies on the
involvement of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) or the Indian
Mujahideen (IM) as gospel truth. Hate messages emailed to the media moments
before the blasts, allegedly by the IM, threatening more revenge and imminent
death to the "kafirs", are telecast and printed repeatedly as evidence of the
terrorist mind-set. Similar pronouncements of hate and violence by the poster
boys of Hindutva do not invite the same relentless treatment.
The other end of the problem is the Indian Muslim community and
its continued state of denial, its own uncritical faith in conspiracy theories.
All acts of terror, 9/11 included, are seen as part of a CIA-Zionist plot – add
the sangh parivar to this evil axis in the Indian context – to demonise Islam
and Muslims. The Indian state and security agencies’ reluctance to monitor, rein
in and expose the ‘Hindu bomb’ (documented in the last two issues of CC)
only allows the denial mind-set among Muslims to flourish.
The recent "encounter killings" at Jamia Nagar in Delhi have
also raised some pertinent questions. Factor in the recent bomb blasts in
Malegaon and Modasa in Gujarat – both of them targeting Muslims – and the
picture gets even murkier. The most worrying aspect of all this is the fact that
with every fresh act of terror the communal divide between Hindus and Muslims
today grows wider than ever before. This cannot be good news for any
peace-loving Indian.