By Harun Lone for TwoCircles.net
Graham Greene, a British novelist wrote, “Media is a word that has come to mean bad journalism.” And in our context, Indian media is a word that undoubtedly has come to mean bad journalism.
The tomfoolery of contemporary Indian media won’t make Indians any better humans than they had proven to be during their own ‘freedom struggle’ against the British. Now the biased and Machiavellian coverage of Indian media has deeply influenced the general public opinion in India and due to which larger populace in India is labored under ‘Kashmirophobia’. Not to miss that many Indians have been exceptionally great in uncovering the carnages in India but when it comes to Kashmir, some show spinelessness, some muteness, some sheer hypocrisy. The bias in Indian media is largely visible. But it is not against any particular point of view or any particular group of people. It is a bias against ‘understanding’.
Thankfully this narrative has been ruptured to a large part. Young Kashmiri journalists have moved beyond Indian media houses and seized the space of opinion in international/global media to raise their voices. Kashmiris have repeatedly shown that they possess an enormous ability and abundance of talent to tell their own stories and I am glad to affirm that they really do not rely on Indian media for their voices being heard. They have no hopes and they seem pretty pleased with the fact. They write their own and they say it on their own.
In the last five to six years, so many Indian masses have started to learn about their surroundings politically, particularly about Kashmir. The credit undeniably goes to the bottomless list of Kashmiri journalists and writers who have majorly contributed to the Kashmir movement. Adding to this, after the gruesome killings in 2010, diverse young Kashmiris ranging from schools to colleges to universities have mastered the use of internet through blogging sites which luckily initiate a two-way communication, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to voice their political concerns.
Blogging, Tweeting & Facebooking has galvanized Kashmiris to focus on their predicament without confronting expurgation & subjective gate-keeping of traditional media. They have shattered the manipulators. These days if there is any protest against injustice in any Indian university in Delhi or elsewhere, the messages displayed on placards is usually taken from the Kashmiri bloggers. So, in the Platonian sense Kashmir is in the ‘state of becoming’.
Gossipmongers, bigots, and liars in the Indian media are the greatest threat to the substantive form of Indian democracy, which either way, hasn’t shown any better progression since its independence, examples of which are: Dalit atrocities, tribal hostilities, and minority rights including safety of Muslims, gender security, poverty, and malnutrition and so on.
Bias, outright lies, paid news and political leanings illustrate much of Indian media for now. There has been a complete failure of understanding’ in India regarding the concept of ‘understanding Kashmiris’. The jaundiced corporate Indian media is majorly responsible for this tangle. It always has had a certain rush to make the political struggle of Kashmir look like a demand for Islamist society by bizarrely linking it to Pakistan and some third-rate extremist stuff around. So, this not only justifies thousands of innocent killings done by the Indian security forces here but also makes it globally defensible by giving it a horrific image. Shall people of Kashmir prove them right by demeaning and demonising both Islam and their political right?
Media judges of India with deliberate ignorance overlook that their own democracy is saturated with Hindu ethnic supremacy. Indian media is stirring up Islamophobia that influences the global polities, assumes that Islam and democracy are not attuned, whereas Islam constitutes a system of freedom and democracy. This assumption is purely nonsensical and reflects majoritarian India’s racism. Political freedom is a tryout with hazards that Kashmiris have ever willed to take. If not any ethical support that is visibly and largely deficient, Indians must reconsider their mindless and biased portrayal of Kashmiris which has chiefly been fed to them by Indian media.
Indian propagandist media and bigots have shamefully failed to understand the ‘absence’ of extreme terror groups like Taliban, Al-Qaeda, ISIS and other hardcore elements in Kashmir because it is indigestible to them that this is the ‘conscious decision’ of Kashmiris and hence proving in demanding a peaceful political solution to much longer political conflict and clearly an aversion to mindless violence. The Indian media need to recall that the job of a journalist is to report the news as it happened, not give their opinions. One writer brilliantly puts it by saying, “Don’t add to the truth, if you do, you may also subtract from it.” They have been running a campaign to ‘distort reality’ in Kashmir. They most of the times maintain that Kashmiris need ‘development’ but the manifestation of anger is so largely political that they avoid seeing the same ‘developmental and administrative centers’ being targeted. Everybody in these media houses get so much information all day long that they lose their common sense in differentiating between an administrative issue and a political issue.
Indian media should immediately realize how significant it is for a journalist to be sincere and probable to his readers and viewers. Even the most shoddily made documentary films are tolerable if they help unfold some specifics and realities that frame us. Media channels should be doing that, but instead it has become a fashion to embark on pointless crusades. Some of these crusades or debates are plainly hollow, completely impoverished of logic and these media keep patting themselves on their backs for having created some cheap sensations. There is a sizeable difference between good debates and ‘theatre’. And it is always easier to copy evil than it is to replicate the good. The Indian TV channels and their daily debates are mostly nothing more than absurd theatre. Usually, the panelists on the show are picked not for their independence of thoughts but for their political persuasions. Screaming, shouting, talking over each other, hurling insults is the kind of theatre that Indian media dishes out as ‘shows’ rather than sensible debates that can unravel facts and where one can learn and unlearn. Not so the usual suspects who are handpicked for the divisive agenda of the media.
In the recent Uri attack the ‘intelligent’ media houses seemed to be on their toes more than the Indian state to conceive a war panic by endlessly saying that ‘India needs to show its strength’. And, when India claimed to have shown its strength by carrying what they call ‘surgical strikes’, media cretins sitting in New Delhi were laughing harder. It was baffling to see journalists laughing on the plight of humans being killed on both sides.
There are other numerous examples to understand the kind of journalism that defines them; one of which is Justice Arnob Goswami of Times Now obviously with a nonsensical cliché of ‘nation wants to know’. He picks up a debate, manages a panel, poses a series of unending questions to them, before they start saying anything, he answers the questions himself, and ultimately draws a conclusion himself. He remains the only one after panelists move out and still demands answers from everyone – from politicians, ordinary citizens and even from the Indian nation collectively. It is always Arnob versus everyone else. He believes that he has to out-do other journalists in every way and he has, by crossing all the barriers of sound.
But he is not the only one. When it comes Barkha Dutt of NDTV 24*7, the buck for the worst journalism stops with her. Whenever the killings by security forces are rampant in Kashmir, she takes a flight to Kashmir, goes through Gupkar road straight to Grand Palace, brings up a pro-India debate with a pro-India politician and vanishes. She claims to have reported on Kashmir conflict for last 18 years but what she has seen is a ‘conflict’, what has she reported is conceit, and what she calls this conflict is alienation. Her smugness is always dominating on her shows, willingness to learn anything is a far-fetched dream. These are the bigger reasons that we might not be able to find many ethically credible journalists in India.
Another recent example is the serpentine ‘Zee News’ channel which broadcasted a botched up video made in Gurez on 20th July, 2016 , part of the North Kashmir’s Bandipore district. That video showed a few people being interviewed including contractors and porters who according to the locals had been working with Indian army. Their anti-freedom quips were palmed off by this unscrupulous news channel as an ‘opinion’ of the whole of Gurez. This is the height of media absurdity. News channel wanted to have a shot to activate a malicious atmosphere in the area and render a public hoo-hah but luckily people didn’t fall prey to this planned manipulation and in turn protested against the news channel for energizing a hysterics about Kashmir and its people.
Another video made by the same ‘news’ channel named ‘Azad Reporting’ was broadcast on October 1 2016 which showed a young journalist (who needs an introduction but doesn’t deserve one) interviewing some Kashmiri youth who had been out to protest against the Indian occupation. The video further shows the blurred faces of those boys and the reporter asks these youth some questions one of which was what does freedom means to them? They reply by saying ‘that they don’t know’. The reporter while asking such questions is sniggering at those boys and doesn’t leave any chance to insult their Kashmiri pride infused in freedom they aspire. When journalism reaches this point, you almost lose hopes to hope anything good for humanity, leave alone Kashmir. Greater part of people if watched it would find a lot of it very awfully unpalatable. But if that’s the way they want to behave, they are to worsen the whole situation than to do any good to it. When you ask the same asinine thing again and again, and when you do that happily you’re well on the way to being a cretin or a politician.
No matter the amount of criticism global media is generally faced with but it’s surely become the nervous system of today’s world. I am not here externally motivated to ridicule or dismiss Indian media but have certain historical compulsions to criticize them. I believe they must also look inside where they have really gone wrong. Indian media should seriously modify its modus operandi of covering the daily India, places of socio-economic conflicts in India and particularly a political conflict like Kashmir. Media like cinema doesn’t go unnoticed in thin air; it has a public role to play. It’s doesn’t mean that we to have to agree on 100%, it doesn’t mean that we have no questions, it doesn’t mean any of these things, but it certainly gives us a space to raise these issues, otherwise the whole project of journalism to transform state & society would have to finish. History of protests across the globe has witnessed that the intelligent use of media can impact the public opinion in West but having affording the kind of ‘intelligence’ is a bigger question that we can ask ourselves!
The author is currently pursuing his Masters in Political Science from Kashmir University