[Reader-list] Maya to sue DJ

[Shivam]

  Maya may take legal action against Dainik Jagran


  The Times of India / Lucknow
  TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 07, 2004 06:01:55 AM ]
  LUCKNOW: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/842904.cms


Bahujan Samaj Party president Mayawati on Tuesday expressed her
displeasure at a "derogatory and casteist" headline in the Hindi daily
Dainik Jagran.

She said her party would explore the possibility of legal action
against the paper for the headline that identified her by her caste.

Her partymen have already filed an FIR against the chief editor,
editor and some other employees of the newspaper under the Scheduled
Caste and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act at Noida's
Sector-20 police station. The FIR accuses the daily of using
objectionable language with regard to Mayawati.

Meanwhile, Noida SP A K Jain said officials of Dainik Jagran had said
the use of the derogatory term was an accident. At a press meet in
Lucknow, Mayawati accused the paper of running a "vilification
campaign."


o o o o o 


  Caste in the newsroom? 
  Caste discrimination in the newsroom? Rubbish, say most upper caste
journalists in Uttar Pradesh. It's all over, say backward caste
journalists.

  By Shivam Vij in Lucknow


How many journalists in the Lucknow office of Dainik Jagran, India's
largest selling newspaper, belong to the Schedule Castes or the 'Other
Backward Castes'?

"I have never counted and I will never count. Caste is not an issue in
this organisation," says Dilip Awasthi, a senior editor with Dainik
Jagran. But a backward caste journalist says that Dainik Jagran in
Lucknow in particular has  been run as a "Brahminical paper".

Unlike Awasthi, backward caste journalists can count their numbers on
the fingertips. Ask them and they start listing names — an exercise
which some upper-caste scribes are also able to undertake. There are
not even half a dozen Dalit journalists in Lucknow, most of whom do
not handle the political beat, and no Dalit journalist works for an
English paper. As for OBC's, you will find at the most one in every
paper.

Why are the numbers so few?  

"They don't go to schools!" says Awasthi. 

And the ones who do? Has he never met a single SC/OBC journalist who's
talented enough for a job?

"Never. They can't write a single sentence properly." 


The full story:
http://www.thehoot.org/story.asp?storyid=Web2196523711Hoot122711%20AM1229&pn=1&section=S16