[Assam] Fwd: [christiancouncil] Caste matters in the Indian Media

Sun Jun 4 12:03:08 PDT 2006

"Dr. Satinath Choudhary"@yahoo.com wrote:  To: christiancouncil at yahoogroups.com
From:"Dr. Satinath Choudhary"
Date: Sun, 04 Jun 2006 17:53:22 +0530
Subject: [christiancouncil] Caste matters in the Indian Media

http://www.hinduonnet.com/2006/06/03/stories/2006060301841000.htm

Caste matters in the Indian media

Siddharth Varadarajan

If television and newspaper coverage of the anti-reservation agitation 
was indulgent and one-sided, the lack of diversity in the newsroom is 
surely a major culprit.

MY FIRST brush with caste prejudice in higher education came in 1999, 
when a group of Dalit students from the University College of Medical 
Sciences (UCMS) came to see me at my office in another English newspaper 
where I worked at the time as an editorial writer.

The students were residents of the hostel and had silently borne the 
brunt of casteist abuse and discrimination for some time. Whether by 
happenstance or design, the Scheduled Caste students were confined to 
two floors and not assigned rooms elsewhere in the building. In the 
dining hall, they were forced by the forward caste majority to sit 
together at one end. If a Dalit student sat somewhere else, he would be 
abused. "Bloody shaddu," one of them was told when he sat amidst others 
by mistake, "you cannot eat with us."

The Dalits put up with this harassment and humiliation because, as one 
of their parents told them, "you have to become a doctor at any cost." 
But the abuse eventually turned to violence and when one of the students 
was badly beaten and another had his room ransacked, they decided to go 
on a dharna. This is also when they ended up in my office.

After hearing them out, I requested the head of the Metro section to 
send someone to UCMS to cover the story. I was promised a reporter would 
be sent soon. Several days went by but nothing appeared. It turned out 
no reporter was assigned. I tried again, this time going one notch 
higher in the editorial chain-of-command. Again there was no response. 
Eventually, I decided to do the story myself. I spent half-a-day at the 
college, interviewed the college authorities, the students on dharna as 
well as the general category students. One of them admitted reluctantly 
to using the slur `shaddu' for the Scheduled Caste students but only as 
a `pet name'.

I filed the story but it did not appear the next day or the day after. 
Nobody ever said the story was not interesting or not up to scratch but 
for some reason space could never be found. The story finally appeared, 
in a cut and mutilated form, a full month after the Dalit students began 
their dharna. Needless to say, the travails of the Dalit students at 
UCMS were not considered newsworthy enough by other newspapers or by any 
of the news channels.

I narrate this story because of how it contrasts with the extraordinary 
indulgence the national media showed the nearly month-long 
anti-reservation agitation of doctors and medical students at AIIMS and 
other colleges. Despite the 24x7 presence of TV cameras, the daily 
protests in favour of reservation by AIIMS doctors and staff under the 
banner of `Medicos Forum for Equal Opportunities' were virtually blacked 
out. One channel showed the counter-protest last Sunday only when a 
`citizen journalist' presented it with footage he had shot. Often, it 
was impossible to separate the breathless TV reporters from the 
anti-reservation doctors they were reporting about. The insensitive and 
casteist forms of protest some of them adopted -- the `symbolic' 
sweeping of streets, the shining of shoes, the singing of songs warning 
OBCs and others to `remember their place' (`apni aukat mein rahio') -- 
were put on air without comment by the channels. Nobody asked what kind 
of doctors these `meritorious' students were likely to become if they 
had such contempt towards more than half the population of India. And in 
a media discourse which routinely reports the protests of the 
underprivileged only as "traffic jams" and other disruptions to the 
"normal" life of the city, the suffering of poor patients as a result of 
the AIIMS strike figured largely as a footnote to the "heroic" struggle 
the medical students and junior doctors were waging.

Amidst the hysteria induced by the media coverage, no one cared to point 
out how indulgent the AIIMS authorities themselves were being towards 
the anti-reservation strike. Earlier this year, when a section of 
doctors concerned about higher user fees being imposed on poor patients 
sought to protest, they were warned of dire consequences. Under the 
terms of a High Court order, no protest or demonstration is permitted 
within the AIIMS campus. Yet nobody demurred when the anti-reservation 
students occupied the lawns, put up shamianas and coolers and received 
the "solidarity" of traders, event managers, and IT employees (whose 
employers usually ban their own staff from ever striking work.)

While there were honourable exceptions -- Outlook, The Hindu , and 
Frontline among them, as well as individual reporters in some newspapers 
and channels -- would the media's coverage have been more balanced had 
there been a greater degree of caste diversity in the newsroom and 
editorial boards of our newspapers and channels? Put another way, in 
egging the forward caste students on to oppose any extension of 
reservation, were forward caste editors and reporters reflecting their 
own personal impatience with the idea of affirmative action? Was the 
media coverage, then, a display of trade unionism by the privileged?

There are no official or industry statistics but every journalist is 
aware of the extent to which forward castes dominate the media. When 
B.N. Uniyal surveyed the scene in 1996, he found not a single Dalit 
accredited journalist in Delhi. Today, the position is unlikely to be 
much better. At a recent meeting of Journalists for Democracy, it was 
reported that an informal survey had found that the number of accredited 
North Indian OBC journalists in Delhi was under 10. I myself have 
counted the number of Muslims with accreditation to the Press 
Information Bureau and they barely cross the three per cent mark. In 
Chhattisgarh, a recent attempt to send Tribal journalists on a training 
programme had to be dropped because there was none.

One is not saying the absence of Dalit or OBC journalists is the product 
of conscious discrimination though that factor cannot be ruled out. But 
the reality of their absence is something the media must have the 
courage to acknowledge.

In an ideal world where professionalism is paramount, the caste or 
religious affiliation of a journalist should not matter. But journalism 
that has little or no space for the majority of citizens is bound to end 
up missing out on the complexity of the society it seeks to cover. Story 
ideas will not be taken up, or if taken up then covered only from a 
particular perspective. To be sure, many of the negative trends so 
evident in Indian journalism -- the shrinkage of space, the lack of 
coverage of rural India or of the problems of poor Indians, the 
episodic, frenetic nature of news, the cult of the Sensex, the 
preoccupation with trivia and sensationalism -- will not be cured by 
newspapers and TV channels hiring more Dalit, OBC, and Muslim 
journalists. But greater workplace diversity will certainly infuse a 
greater degree of vitality in the newsroom as wider varieties of lived 
experience intrude upon and clash with the largely urban, rich, forward 
caste Hindu certitudes of the overwhelming majority of journalists.

Far from seeing affirmative action as a threat, India's media houses 
should look upon the entry of Dalit, Tribal, OBC, and Muslim journalists 
as an opportunity to broadbase their journalism and make it more 
professional and authentic. Last year, Ankur and Sarai-CSDS provided 
teenagers in the now-demolished slum cluster of Nangla Machi with 
computers. The daily diaries and fly-sheets they produced even as their 
homes were being brought down by bulldozers is journalism of as high a 
quality as anyone can find in India today (Interested readers should 
visit http://www.sarai.net/nm.htm). Certainly their writings tell us 
more about the reality of "slum clearance" than any of our TV channels, 
and in prose that is better than what one normally gets to read in our 
newspapers.

As the OBC and SC-ST youths who want to become doctors and engineers are 
saying, merit is not simply a score that can be bought by parents who 
have the money to invest in the most expensive education for their 
children. It is also about the talent that all children have within them 
regardless of their caste or socio-economic background. A society -- or 
an industry like the media -- which does not find a way to tap that 
talent will only end up impoverishing itself. Specifically, media houses 
must seriously think about starting internships and training programmes 
for Dalit, Tribal, Muslim, and OBC students interested in becoming 
journalists.

Reservation, affirmative action, targeted expenditure, and investment 
are all means of society helping people unlock their inherent talent. As 
pro-reservation scholars such as Yogendra Yadav, Satish Deshpande, 
Purshottam Aggarwal, and others have argued, the United Progressive 
Alliance Government's current approach is not necessarily the best one. 
But by conducting a shrill campaign and encouraging forward caste 
students to launch an ill-conceived agitation, the media themselves 
foreclosed the possibility of a rational debate on what the best way of 
building an inclusive education system really is. When the dust settles, 
the media should introspect and ask what they can do to make society as 
a whole more inclusive. Encouraging conversation and not hectoring is 
one way. But another is surely to diversify the newsroom by consciously 
bringing in those sections of society who have hitherto been excluded. 
There are a million stories out there waiting to be told. If only we 
allow the storytellers to do the telling.

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