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The Indian media and the stone age
• Date published: July 28, 2010
When it comes to Kashmir, you need to reconcile yourself to a few facts. First, you know as little about the goings-on there as the Indian news media condescends to tell you. And second, you know as much about the happenings there as you delve through alternative sources for news. And a corollary to the first would be that you believe as much rubbish as media wants you to.
If you thought from the coverage both in the print and broadcast media that Kashmir was finally in the news, well, here’s some news for you – you fell to the corollary machination. For the last two years while the Valley burned, all you had was either no coverage or skewed coverage. You just might concur that both are indeed much and the same.
Of militants, and tackling militancy
• Date published: March 6, 2010
It's the kind of news item that tends to get buried under others of heavier national importance; for it hardly has any news value that any journalist worth one's salt would ascribe to it. This particular news item one read was about 36 former militants being appointed on Saturday as constables in the Jammu and Kashmir police. No big deal, that. In any case, nothing new about such a measure either.
It is not the news item in itself that is a cause for worry – reading between its lines is, and also by going beyond the straightjacket, desultory headline.
The girl who thrashed a soldier for trying to molest her. Hai jawan!
• Date published: August 11, 2009
The history of the Northeast is the history of romantic insurgencies and pyrrhic wars, devastating blasts and brutal carnages, internecine squabbles and ethnic clashes, political chicanery and myopic governance, and what have you. It is also the history of atrocities. By the agents of the State.
When Naga women were raped on church pulpits by the sacrosanct Indian forces, it was something that never coalesced into the form of news. But these days some news do trickle out.
Like that of a gutsy girl in Haflong who took on a group of Army jawans, sometime in the last week of July.
Operation Blackout: Keeping Kashmir out of the news
• Date published: August 11, 2009
In July I received a mail from a journalist who wanted to pitch me an interesting story idea from Kashmir. The mail was directed to an account I hardly check. Not that it would have made much difference since Newswatch carries only content that has something to do with the news media. I gather she pitched the story to many publications.
The story, let me tell you, never saw the light of day anywhere in this country where Kashmir is such an emotively jingoistic issue. Close to a month later, the story has appeared, but not in an Indian publication. I happened to stumble across it quite perchance in the New Internationalist.
Yet I am not surprised that no Indian publication wanted to carry the story despite the fact that the journalist, Dilnaz Boga, writes well. And more than anything else, it was a good story.
Read the blurb. If it doesn't make sense to you, you probably need to see a shrink:
This is one of India's most blacked-out stories
It ought to be counted as one of India’s most downplayed stories of the day. It is about the struggle to save an ecosystem called Niyamgiri in Orissa from mining, deforestation and devastation. It is about indigenous people and the rights over their land.
Vedanta Resources, a stinking rich British company owned by NRI Anil Agarwal, intends to dig an open-pit bauxite mine in Niyamgiri. This mine will destroy the forests on which the Dongria Kondh depend and wreck the lives of thousands of other Kondh tribal people living in the area. The Supreme Court has given the go ahead for the project, but the battle rages on. Albeit silently. This project, by the way, will also see the death of the centuries-old sacred groves of these people. The Dongria Kondh do not live anywhere else and there are just 8,000 of them left.
The silent Bangladeshi invasion of Assam
A week ago an unsettling incident occurred in Assam that went largely unnoticed in the Indian media.
Over a thousand suspected illegal migrants crossed the Dhansiri river and, with impunity, took over parts of Orang National Park in Darrang district in the early hours of May 6. They came from the innumerable chars (riverine islands) that dot the Brahmaputra river. They did not come empty-handed – they brought along building materials and cattle. They apparently had come to stay. For good.
By the time forest guards spotted the invaders that afternoon, the migrants had already erected a hundred makeshift houses or more. The unnerved forest personnel called back for more hands and resources; they did not dare take on the illegal migrants who were armed with sharp weapons. The latter had not only come here to stay, but seemed inordinately determined to do so.