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Case and tale
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.
The girl who thrashed a soldier for trying to molest her. Hai jawan!
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
Protesters shouting pro-freedom slogans on a Friday afternoon outside Jama Masjid (mosque) in Srinagar.
Photo © Dilnaz Boga
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:
In the strife-torn valley of India-controlled Kashmir, the decades-long conflict continues to take its toll, especially on its young. Dilnaz Boga has met some of them.
So, the blackout of Kashmir from the Indian media landscape continues. It has been so since the massive pro-freedom protests that took place in Kashmir about a year ago. What we get to read, hear or see is hardly worth writing home about. Yes, except for those sex scandals and the consequent political fallouts.
You get to hear all that the Omars and Mehboobas have to say about each other. Or ridiculing the hopelessly splintered separatists. Or you read of stories planted and sponsored by the defence and home ministries. One somehow gets the feeling that it is quite in the Indian government's interest to ensure that voices of the ordinary people of Kashmir remain unheard elsewhere in India. And the media stays on the politically correct side.
Last year, we had wanted to do a comprehensive content analysis of the news media coverage of Kashmir. It would have been a big project. But it fell flat because no one was willing to sponsor it. This fact itself says a lot, doesn't it?
For the moment, we will have to stay content with reading stories about Kashmir in non-Indian publications. And if you too have not read the Dilnaz piece, read it here: http://www.newint.org/features/special/2009/08/06/cry-for-freedom/
....and this dwarfing/blacking out of what happens in Kashmir perpetuates so many myths about Kashmir throughout the country. tsk! tsk! The stereotype of 'nationalism' is so strong that it becomes almost blasphemous to question it, even for a 'free, independent' media in a democratic country.
yes anuradha... it is blasphemous. question them, and one will be branded anti-national
Subirda in your article you write "Last year, we had wanted to do a comprehensive content analysis of the news media coverage of Kashmir. It would have been a big project. But it fell flat because no one was willing to sponsor it. This fact itself says a lot, doesn't it?" What do you mean by this? How much money dos it take?
satyen: something of this sort would be on the higher side.. prolly 40-50k
sorry satyen. there was a typo.. in this case it would have been 140-150k. anyway, that is for academic interest
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