By Ranjona Banerji
If India is broken, the India media is broken.
We have now lost all sense of right and wrong, of legal and illegal, of truth and lies, of power and helplessness.
Across North India – and sadly, this has happened largely North India but there are repercussions all over our nation – “journalists” and media people dance on the debris of the bodies, lives and demolished homes of Muslims. And on rule of law, property, jurisdiction, human rights and democracy.
And their danse macabre continues when Muslim journalists are targeted by the state. The glee increases if the journalists are Muslim and women.
Senior journalist Saba Naqvi is this time’s target. She is one of people named in an FIR over the diplomatic debacle after former BJP spokesperson, Nupur Sharma, abused Islam and the Prophet in a TV show. The FIR against Naqvi is for promoting enmity, inducing to commit and offence and deliberate acts to outrage religious feeling. Others in the list are known hate-speech offenders of the most criminal variety.
Naqvi’s crime? She retweeted something and then deleted it. She faces another FIR for a deleted tweet from earlier this year. And her name was included in the appalling ‘Bulli Bai” auction of Muslim women by young Hindu men and women.
Several media organisations have protested against this FIR against Naqvi and statements have been issued by the Press Club of India (meaning Delhi) and the Delhi Union of Journalists. However, one hears that within the media community in Delhi our Modi-loving colleagues are angry at these statements and the support shown to Naqvi. Grumbles of how “Hindus must be avenged” are swirling about.
Are we surprised? Not once in the past eight years have India’s journalists stood together when one of their own has been killed, abused, arrested by the state or the state’s henchmen. So, it’s a tall order to expect support for a mere FIR.
Those of us who thought the media divide was bad in the late 1980s and early 90s during the Ram Janmabhoomi movement were living in a fool’s paradise it seems. Things are so much worse now because all the checks and balances are gone. After the demolition of the Babri Masjid by the RSS’s cohorts in 1992, many of the media’s outright Hindutva supporters vanished back into the woodwork.
But since 2014, they’ve grown and multiplied. A new generation of journalists is now in charge. Some care not about democracy and rule of law nor about a free and secular India. Others are in it for as much material gain and power as they can squeeze out. And both categories are avid supporters of the RSS and BJP. Whether by personal belief or for personal profit.
At the top of the pyramid, giving these bigots ample support is the old guard. Some are those who were too cowardly to put their bigotry up front in their day. Others prefer to maintain an “objective” front, which means looking back in history to find analogies in previous governments which can then be used as an excuse by current supporters of the regime. Both are as dangerous.
Open bigots are easier to understand than these sly champions of destruction.
You can see how no action has been taken against the TV anchors who encouraged Nupur Sharma. They are the same breed who will not speak up for the Naqvis of the world. They are the same breed who apparently believe that the correct “punishment” for rioting is the bulldozing of your property. Am interested to know how they would have responded if in 2002 the homes of rioting Hindus in Gujarat had been bulldozed? Or of the Hindu perpetrators of the Nellie massacre of 1983? Or of the Hindu rioters of Bombay 1993?
There is one more tragic lesson for journalists here, those who sit permanently on the fence: eventually, there will be no one to speak up for you. Those whom you support with your “both sides-ism” do not care what happens to you. And those who will speak up are being picked off one by one.
Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She writes on MxMIndia on Tuesdays and Fridays. Her views here are personal.