Reporting Gujarat - (The Hoot.Org, 30/05/2002)

Selective Contextualisation and Editorial Amnesia

The media tore the whole turmoil out of its context and, as Johann Galtung says, focussed on the irrational without looking at the reasons for the unresolved conflicts and polarisation.

-- By By Dasu Krishnamoorty

The texts of journalists sizzled like the fires of conflict in Gujarat, unloading on the readers miles of angry prose that is the envy of Arundhati Roy. Since reporting mainly concerns facts, it loses some of factualness when narrative is employed as the ballast of the text and facts as its handmaiden. Narrative has the quality of producing ideological closure denying the reader an alternative account. In the stampede for outdoing each other, reporters seem to have forgotten this aspect. Editors had to do a lot of explaining at seminars and in the columns of their own newspapers to live down the charge of bias. One crucial way in which reporting is distinguished from analyses and other forms of editorial exercises is agency-style writing that is clinical and neutral. It abjures passions and so does not arouse passions. In times of social strife, it becomes doubly necessary to respect this norm.

Narrative transforms the reporter from an observer of the event to an interpreter of the event and some times a prosecutor. Religious strife has always inspired reporters to scale the heights of free verse. Arty prose either edges out or embellishes facts. A fact-fiction partnership usurps the traditional story structuring of its functional role. Gujarat riots saw heavily structured and treated reports. The new tradition began with newsmen discovering the joys of creative journalism and affiliation to exotic ideologies. Once a reporter believes in some 'ism', he forfeits his credentials to be a reporter. The ideology of that 'ism' seeps into his reports too. He will be an asset for a party journal.

Loss of Perspective

Since someone has already written for The Hoot on this aspect of reporting, I will limit myself only to two aspects of our press in reporting and commenting on the Gujarat riots. One is decontextualisation or selective contextualisation. The other is editorial amnesia. The trouble began in Godhra when mobs set ablaze a train carrying kar sewaks returning from Ayodhya. Next day reprisals started and took more than two months to stop. Now, to attribute the violence to the goings-on in Ayodhya or the arson at Godhra or the reaction to it is to drown the real context. I do not deny that hundreds have been killed or do I deny it is a heinous crime. Those are facts but not all the facts. But the constant reference to Ayodhya to contextualise the Gujarat tragedy pushed to the background the original setting that informs all communal riots in the country.

The media tore the whole turmoil out of its context and, as Johann Galtung says, focussed on the irrational without looking at the reasons for the unresolved conflicts and polarisation. It is the context of the event that helps the audience to accomplish a tenable perspective of the event. Neither the arson at Godhra nor the continuing riots in Ahmedabad are independent of a past or are sudden and unpredicted occurrences. They were waiting to happen. This past has been visiting the people repeatedly and ruthlessly: a past rooted in the partition of the country on the basis of religion. The founders of the Indian republic embraced secularism but enshrined religion in the Constitution. The problem started here and without this context all reporting tends to be one-sided.

Accepting partition on the basis of religion meant recognition of the thesis that religion could be the context for nation making. The Constitution sanctified religion by conferring privileges and safeguards on minorities, on the basis of their faith. This is the genesis of the communal divide. Several times, the Supreme Court of India tried to define the frontiers of religious privileges. Nearly every political party, mainly the Congress, thwarted such efforts. For instance, the bill to reserve seats for women in Parliament could not even be tabled because the Samajwadi Party demanded that the seats be distributed on a religious basis. As Jawaharlal Nehru said: If you seek to give special safeguards to a minority, you isolate it. Maybe, you protect it, but at what cost? At the cost of isolating it and keeping it away from the main current in which the majority is going, at the cost of forgetting that inner sympathy and fellow feeling with the majority.

Editorial Sleight

In the latest episode of Gujarat violence, the Muslims were the first to strike at Godhra. The media could not escape the compulsion of condemning the attack. Yet, they could not resist the temptation of blaming the Vishwa Hindu Parishad for providing provocation to the arsonist mob. Every newspaper blamed the VHP. As Vir Singhvi, editor of the Hindustan Times said 'Basically, they condemn the crime; blame the victims.' After a ritual condemnation of the arson,an Indian Express editorial refers to the activity of the VHP at Ayodhya for building a temple at the site of the demolished Babri mosque. Then follows this gem: "Many cautioned that the VHP's hate-filled campaign could provide latitude to other practitioners of a similarly bad and bigoted politics. The ghastly violence at Godhra would appear to be the embodiment of the worst of those fears coming true."The Hindu waited for a whole day to look for an alibi for the arsonists. Luckily for the Hindu, reprisals came the day after the Godhra incident. The Hindu editorial says, "Impelled as the VHP and its allies in the sangh parivar are by atavistic passion and revanchism, their high-voltage protest are flash points,given the hate campaign aggressively mounted against the minority community in the pursuit of their political agenda." So, the blinkers both newspapers wore did not allow them to see the hate campaigns in the Urdu press and in the English press repeating the same litany of abuses the Muslim priests hurl at the majority community at their Friday prayer assemblies. The Times of India editorial began with advising the government to see that "The call of the law and order is not allowed to degenerate into a witch hunt against any particular community. There is need to look at the larger political context, which might have provided the unfortunate spark for the attack. In the last few weeks, the VHP and its affiliates have upped the ante on the Ram Mandir (Ayodhya temple) issue, demanding that the Center unilaterally hand over the disputed Babri Masjid site to them so that they can begin construction of the temple." The Hindustan Times too succumbed to the temptation of blaming the VHP for supplying the spark for the Muslim attack. Later, its editor made amends by writing two articles in which he clearly stated that 'The secular establishment was not as vociferous in its condemnation of Godhra as it should have been.'

Far-fetched

Now let us see whether the attempt to build a temple at Ayodhya was the immediate cause and the Godhra arson its effect. The temple dispute is 52 years old. It reached a flash point when several thousand kar sevaks converged on Ayodhya in December 1992 and in a senseless frenzy brought down a structure the Muslims claim to be a mosque built by the first Muslim ruler Babur. The people who travelled in that train set afire on 27 February were returning from Ayodhya after visiting the site where the VHP plans to build a temple. Godhra is 2,000 miles away from Ayodhya and the mosque-temple row is half a century old. How could this be a sudden provocation to people so far away from the disputed site to burn a train?

The consequences of a one-way street in the long run are ominous for the interests of the country. The fallout of the accommodation at the time of the partition was a surge in secessionist claims by minorities on the basis of religion. The Christians in the North East are still engaging the country's army in guerilla battles. In Punjab, it cost several thousand civilian lives before the Khalistan movement was put down. The Kashmir liberation movement is denting the country's defence armor. The country could have been spared of all this hatred and distrust and the consequent killings if the Congress party and the media had not distorted the concept of secularism into a selective worship of faith.

Read what Saeed Naqvi has to say of our kind of secularism: "The word secularism, let us face it, was profaned by the Congress. The word became a trick to keep the minority vote in its fold." Or for that matter, S. Nihal Singh: "The Congress is primarily to blame for keeping the communal politics alive, Nehru initially giving the Muslim League in Kerala respectability at a time when it was far from certain about its future. Since then Muslim parties have proliferated and gained strength, not in resolving their followers' problems but in extracting concessions for the leaders. Since the leaders of the Muslim political parties have an interest in nurturing communal passions and grievances to retain their hold and deliver votes to other parties for a price, the cauldron of communal politics must keep on simmering."