By Shehzad Poonawala,
As intellectual circles gather themselves in air-condtioned news-channel studios and express their “shock” and “awe” at what they describe to be a “brutal” crackdown by the central government on peaceful protestors at the Ram Leela Maidan in the early hours of Sunday- June 5th, the question that begs an answer is why has the same media and civil society, which has been pontificating on civil rights of citizens, completely ignored a far more vicious assault on a peaceful demonstration in Bihar?
As reported by TwoCircles.net, a leading web-based news portal, on 3rd June 2011, residents of Rampur and Bhajanpur villages under Forbesganj block in Araria district came out, after Juma (Friday) Prayers, to protest against the blockade of the connecting road between the two villages for a factory. The police not only opened fire on the protestors but chased them to their homes, entered in and killed even women and an infant by shooting them point-blank. Six people including two women and a six-month-old infant were killed. Yet, this incident was largely unreported and did not cause even a flutter amongst the so called “civil society” groups who were out with their knives against the central government for lobbing tear-gas shells and perhaps at most, lathi-charging a crowd that had resorted to stone-pelting on the police at Ram Leela Maidan.
Bihar Media
While I do not condone the aggression displayed by the police at Ram Leela, if one views both these incidents objectively, the actions of the Bihar Police that cost people their lives were far more de-humanizing and posed a much larger threat to our Fundamental Rights than what transpired in Delhi. So why hasn’t anyone from the media asked Nitish Kumar for an explanation, as has been rightly sought from the Union government? Why hasn’t Anna Hazare, who has in the past endorsed the model of governance in Bihar under the JD(U)-BJP combine not spoken a word against this act, which constitutes a blot on our democracy? Why hasn’t the BJP kept a 24 hour long fast for those who lost their lives in the Forbesganj firing at Rajghat just like they did for the supporters of Baba Ramdev? Why have such double standards been employed?
I am not making an attempt to draw parallels between the two situations. Surely, there can be no condemnation of police terror but are we setting a good precedent by virtually ignoring the atrocities that have been inflicted on a people just because they happen to hail from a rural minority background? Isn’t this a silent acknowledgment of the inherent biases in the media and civil society groups towards a particular class and community of people? I believe that such discrimination will only add to the ever increasing differences between India and Bharat and demonstrate how skewed the odds are in favour of an urbane, shrill majority, which perhaps makes for better TRPs for television news channels and political posturing as against the rural, silent minority, which appear to have been condemned to ignorance and systematic marginalization.
The question really is whether this is healthy for our democracy? The answer is a resounding NO. Democracies are always representative of a harmonious marriage between majority rule and minority rights. Theoretically, every law in our country and every provision of the Indian Constitution attempts to achieve this balance and egalitarianism. People like Gandhi and Nehru infused life into these theoretical structures and attempted to put theories of social justice and equanimity into practice. But today, we as a democracy, guided by agenda-driven, propagandist media ideologies tinged with an inherent right-winged flavour, seem to be shifting towards a norm that “might is right”. This, I am afraid will reduce our democracy into a mobocracy, where respect for Rule of Law will be scant and invariably constitutionally mandated democratic institutions will be rendered irrelevant due to the systematic eroding of public confidence in them, primarily caused by a kangaroo system of media justice being dished out on prime time by holier-than-thou news anchors.
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The author is law graduate from Pune’s Indian Law Society and political activist