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24 x 7: Breaking News, Lies and No
Shame
Kalam Nishan Singh
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“We still don’t know
who actually killed the Sikhs of Chittisinghpora. But to even
ask the question is to invite mostly indifference or
contemptuous anger in the Indian public,” Barkha Dutt wrote. It
is here that Ms Dutt is becoming a victim of a disease she has
herself diagnosed so well, and so bravely underlined it. Why
did, and why does she now, not ask the same question that must
had been asked even at that time? |
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 One of the
traditions that the media in
India has
completely remained blissfully unaware of, or perhaps very
deliberately aloof from, is the tradition of ‘Media about media’. So
rare is there any attempt to look inwards, and so comfortable this
tradition of not asking questions about one’s own self and about
others in the vocation, that the tradition has helped in near total
depoliticalization of, of all the people, journalists. Such has been
the pervasive influence of this tradition that now you are likely to
routinely come across even political journalists who are pretty
depoliticized, innocent of the notions of the functioning of the
nation-state and eager to cover a dharna of the farmers from the
stand point of law and order.
Read a recent
despatch in a
Chandigarh based
English daily: “Despite the police being aware of the farmers’
dharna, not many barricades were put up to contain them on the
outskirts of the city, and instead they were able to squat on the
key roads leading to major difficulties for Chandigarhians. But it
is clear that no heads will roll in the police even as farmers
continue to squat by the Rose Garden boundary wall, destroying the
delicately and painstakingly manicured garden paths.”
Only in extreme
cases does the focus turn to media. And one recent case involved the
reportage of the murder of 14-year old Aarushi Talwar. Media came in
for some criticism (which it was quick to call “guillotining of the
media”) about why newspapers and TV channels were reporting wayward
theories of the police without any skepticism and disbelief.
Addressing these
questions and issues, one of India’s best known journalists in
recent times, Barkha Dutt (often known for her incisiveness and an
expressed wish to retain sanity and a sense of ethics) wrote a piece
last week in English language daily Hindustan Times. But what, in the
course of her arguments, had Ms Dutt to say about the
Chattisinghpura massacre of the Sikhs is something that interests us
here.
Ms Dutt pointed
to a former police officer’s argument on national TV who said the
cops at times felt “public and political pressure” and such pressure
made “men like him to embellish, exaggerate and, yes, even
‘fabricate the truth’.”
The description
of the 24 x 7 Indian news television as “a greedy, hyperventilating”
industry is not enough, and Ms Dutt did well in opening a chapter
which the Sikh community has focused little on.
Talking about
the Indian news-consuming public, the columnist said it permits
“interrogation of certain institutions when it doesn’t interfere
with our pre-conceived notions of fact and fiction. We are willing
to be skeptical only if our belief system is allowed to remain
intact. We always need and cling to the comfort of some of our
collective fables and fairy tales.”
It will be only
fair to give certain quotes extensively in order to help you savour
the central point of her thesis:
“When the
grim-faced men go on television and release sketches of suspects
along with funny-sounding acronyms of the terrorist groups they
supposedly belong to, do we ever wonder whether we are being fed
fabrications? When the Minister of State for Home unfailingly points
to a ‘foreign hand’ each and every time, without a blink of the eye,
do we wonder whether he’s lying?
Do we demand to
know how it is that so many details are available with our cops and
our sleuths just minutes after a terrorist strike?”
Ms Dutt brought
out how, seven years ago, 40 Sikhs were killed in a remote
village
of Kashmir, the news figuring in international headlines because
Bill Clinton was visiting India within hours. And within hours,
Indian Home Secretary announced that five terrorists who had killed
the villagers had been caught and eliminated.
Only, after many
protests by local Kashmiri Muslims, the bodies of the killed
terrorists were exhumed and it was conclusively proven that every
one of them was an innocent civilian “drawn at random by a harried
security force and then shot in cold blood, so that the case could
be closed.”
“We still don’t
know who actually killed the Sikhs of Chittisinghpora. But to even
ask the question is to invite mostly indifference or contemptuous
anger in the Indian public,” Barkha Dutt wrote. It is here that Ms
Dutt is becoming a victim of a disease she has herself diagnosed so
well, and so bravely underlined it. Why did, and why does she now,
not ask the same question that must had been asked even at that
time? Particularly because from day one, there have been questions
about that massacre and there has been a clear needle of suspicion
towards some agents of the Indian nation state whose role during
years of militancy has remained suspect.
The Punjab
Police has routinely shown many young Sikhs as terrorists, but the
media happily played along, faithfully reproducing the press
releases from the police as the Gospel truth. And there was no
“Media about media”. Those who remained participants in peddling of
lies rose to great heights in Indian journalism. Much of
India’s
news agency journalism during the late 1980s and early 1990s in
Punjab
thrived on police press releases. And even the later surge of media
studies never considered it a subject worthy of any deep discussion.
Indian security
forces routinely resorted to illegal and incommunicado detention of
youth, labeling them terrorists and a ‘Pakistan-returned’ ‘training
equipped’ module even before the poor fellow could see the face of a
court. Till date, journalists in Punjab and elsewhere in India rush
to even small time police officers at the drop of a hat for one or
the other press conference where these “terrorists” are paraded
before them and their photos appear in the media the next day, some
corpulent police officers grinning from side to side featuring in
the photos as if with a trophy. How many journalists care to follow
through any particular case to any logical end?
That the
Punjab
police frequently tortured the detainees is a statement of fact
known from the small time stringer of a small time daily in a sleepy
Malwa village to self-styled civil society leaders like Kuldip Nayar
and even Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. These torture methods
include electric shocks, tearing the legs apart at the waist and
causing pelvic and muscle injury, and pulling out the hair and beard
of the detainees, among other techniques. Immediate family members
of any targeted individual are routinely threatened and detained,
again part of
India’s lower
and middle classes’ knowledge which has become some kind of mental
furniture in their heads.
Government has
never publicly acknowledged, investigated, or redressed the
violations and media questions them only till the point of comfort.
Result: We have become immune to elaborate stories of thwarted
militant crimes, recovered weapons, captured human bombs, and the
discovery of an international network to revive militancy in
Punjab.
Concealed in such stories is the escalation in human rights abuses
committed in the name of national security and a clear will and more
to fabricate evidence.
Nothing moved
the top honchos of the Indian media, not even the revelations that
man after man killed by the Punjab Police in encounters was found
alive even as cops had presented the dead bodies and gotten
themselves photographed with the trophies!
Now that the
murder of a perky little teenage girl has made the media look
inwards, may be we can all do more than mere lip service. A full
frontal view with the benefit of the hindsight will show us all the
warts and shame. The sooner we recognize this, and muster up the
will and determination to apply the corrective, the better it will
be for the health of the Indian nation state. Otherwise the disease
is eating at the innards. The nation state can muzzle its
minorities, confuse its struggles and give a bad name to the heroes
of the land, but will it be able to continue to stand brave when its
innards get rotten and stink of shame?
It was amusing
to read Ms Dutt: “We have long known that the camera can lie. Now we
must accept, so can the State.” Good, that the Indian media has
finally cared to see that. The illiterate, the minorities, the
deprived and the marginalized have long known that too. Welcome aboard the
club of the well aware, particularly those who graduated from
universities and not inside the torture chambers of
Punjab
police thanas.
18
June,
2008
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