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 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.

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:

These are, we are told, exciting times for those in the media. Not an unsubstantiated, flippant contention one would say if one is abreast of all the investments that have been pouring in, the plethora of newspapers and magazines that are being launched every other day, or for that matter the television channels that are going on air till you stop losing count on your fingers. And if you are aware of all the technological breakthroughs that is driving communications today, you would stand firmly convinced that it is indeed so. The media is in flux, and excitingly so. But then it is also time for us to take stock of things by going beyond the exciting headlines that have been tingling our fertile imagination. We need to look at the trees, and miss the forest, for once. For the sake of convenience and space constraints, this write-up will look only at the news media and desist from pedantic number-crunching.

The Best Bakery and Jessica Lall court rulings are now being seen in conjunction. It is natural that they would be. Not only did one judgment follow close on the heels of the other, they also provided an interesting study of contrasts. That of the consectaneous deduction that witnesses will gush forth with the truth in a conducive environment. [Henceforth, BB – Best bakery, and JL – Jessica Lall, for the sake of convenience] The court ruling in the JL case left everyone despondent. Disenchanted with the system. The ruling in the BB case seemed to underpin the argument about the necessity of witness protection programmes, about botched-up police investigations, about perjury penalisation for hostile winesses, and others. The problem, we are being told over and over again, is with the system. About the law being an ass.