Category: MEDIA

By Ranjona Banerji

Once more into the breach: That is how the Indian media deals with news breaks. From flip-flopping over the Pathankot attack and a number of senior editors and journalists trying to protect the government from accusations of inefficiency and worse, we now have journalists trying to be fair on Dalit issues. Forgive me if I sound cynical. It is only because I have seen too much anti-Dalit and anti lower caste prejudice from upper caste journalists in newsrooms, especially in recent times. This is nothing but a massive tragedy because if journalists do not stand up for the underprivileged, then who will?

So now we have a situation where a research scholar at Hyderabad University, Rohith Vemula, commits suicide under some very unfortunate if not almost criminal circumstances. India discovers that he was part of a group called the Ambedkar Students’ Association, which is considered “radical” by members of the BJP’s student wing the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad. Vemula and four other students were suspended by the university over a fight with the ABVP. Vemula’s stipend was withheld for months, leaving him and his family desperate.

What made the case worse was that a BJP minister wrote to the HRD ministry to inform them of the ASA’s apparent assault on the ABVP and that these students were “anti-national”. Further, the HRD ministry consequently sent a number of letters to the university until these five Dalit students were suspended. The BJP, as is its wont these days, took too long to respond and several journalists decided to concentrate on the fact that the Congress vice-president rushed to Hyderabad rather than discrimination against Dalit students in higher educational institutions in India or government interference in support of a political party’s student body, which perhaps were the bigger stories.

This is not the first time that we have seen upper caste anger against Dalits at institutes of higher education in India. IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIT Roorkee, Hyderabad University – these are only some examples of discrimination and prejudice against Dalits. It is a story that ought to be looked at thoroughly and not through the prism of upper caste angst as is evident in websites like Swarajya, for instance where takes the position that these Dalit students, by demanding their rights and holding “uncomfortable” positions, are somehow the problem. By Indian law, caste discrimination is illegal: should journalists be aware of this?

On the evening of Thursday January 21, NDTV and India Today TV focussed on this issue. Times Now and NewsX were engrossed on a probable scam in Bihar and CNN-IBN looked at students’ suicides at Kota coaching centres. However to be fair, the media as a whole has made Rohith Vemula a household name and only a few of the usual suspects have been left scrambling to protect the BJP government at the Centre.

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Bhupendra Chaubey of CNN-IBN, who has lately stewarded the channel back to a more professional mode since its ownership turmoil, found himself the butt of jokes on social media and had to face the rage of Bollywood. While interviewing Bollywood actress Sunny Leone, he focused for too long on her past as a porn star, to the extent that he was offensive and misogynistic. His questions included asking her if her presence in front of him would morally corrupt him. He also suggested that actors like Aamir Khan would never act with her. Leone was dignified throughout, which only added to her charm.

As it happened, Aamir Khan tweeted he would be happy to act with Leone. Firstpost.com put up this defence of Chaubey, which was a superb move considering that they are sister concerns.

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/in-defence-of-bhupendra-chaubey-outrage-about-the-sunny-leone-interview-is-misplaced-2592884.html

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The death of Dr Aroon Tikekar this week marks a sad day for Indian journalism. He belonged to that old school of erudite, informed and free-thinking journalists who cared more for their convictions than for corporate success. He will be sorely missed in all his capacities but especially as a thinker and a mentor. I feel privileged that he considered me a friend.

By Ranjona Banerji

There are many embarrassments in the life of a journalist. Let’s face it, the job by nature aligns itself to errors. Some are genuine and some are what we like to term “judgment calls”: a rose by any name you may well argue. For those who thrive on sensationalism, the “mistakes” are deliberate: to slightly twist facts, to mislead with a headline, to focus on one aspect while ignoring the context. To a certain kind of editor, this is what sells and this is what needs to be presented to the “gullible” reader. Because after all, if there are people who genuinely believe in the headline, “Woman gives birth to two-headed goat”, then who is the humble press to disillusion them. Yes, “tabloid” or “yellow” journalism has its place: Usually entertaining, often nasty and sometimes punishable by law.

However, what about errors that spring from a complete absence of established journalistic controls and checks and balances? What happens when editors themselves decide to put information into the public domain without checking authenticity but having no qualms about maligning people? I do not hold with the theory that all television journalism is bad although I have excoriated it enough in these columns.

But, the curious case of the letter about Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose deserves time and attention. Twitter and social media were abuzz this week over a letter written by Jawaharlal Nehru to British prime minister Clement Attlee in 1945 which apparently emerged from the files relating to the freedom fighter, declassified by the government on Bose’s birthday, January 23. Bose’s disappearance, as is well-known in India, has long been a source of controversy and conspiracy theories. The fact that successive governments have refused to release any information has only added to the myth and the dissatisfaction.

It is therefore hardly surprising that a fake letter that has been doing the rounds for six months before declassification should excite people who are waiting for information that would put the Congress Party and India’s first prime minister under murky light.

But is that reason enough for a seasoned television journalist like Rahul Kanwal, joined by Aditya Raj Kaul, to start pushing this fake letter as real on Twitter and Facebook and demanding an explanation from the Congress Party? The letter had many giveaways. For one, Clement Attlee’s name was spelt wrong and so was Nehru’s. What are the odds that Nehru did not know how to spell both his own name and that of the British prime minister? Further, Nehru was not prime minister of India in 1945 and Attlee was not prime minister of “England”. The letter is unsigned. The grammar is appalling. I can understand that people schooled in the RSS version of Indian history, filled with Vedic spacecraft and advanced infertility treatment, know nothing about Nehru but any regular school-going child knows that Nehru studied in the British public school Harrow and at Cambridge University. He also wrote several books. However much you hate him, his English was close to impeccable.

There is more than ideological underpinning that is the problem here, though. It is the rush to get a story out without checking the facts. All Kanwal and Raj Kaul needed to do was sit down and think for 10 minutes. That is, I assume they did not do so. If they did, the situation is truly dire.

As I have understood from social media, Kanwal deleted his Facebook post which had put forward reasons on why the letter was real and Raj Kaul apologised. This was only after historians and the general public explained how the letter was fake, which should in fact have been obvious. Here are details on the website scroll.in:

http://scroll.in/article/802403/twitter-starts-to-mock-fake-nehru-letter-with-fake-nehru-whatsapp-messages

As for the promotion of the fake letter: that was just bad journalism. There can be no “judgment call” excuse here.