October 2008 
Year 15    No.135
Editorial


Mind-set and the free press

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.

— EDITORS


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