[Reader-list] Caste matters in the Indian media: Siddharth Varadarajan

[Shivam Vij]

Caste matters in the Indian media

By Siddharth Varadarajan
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/thscrip/print.pl?file=2006060301841000.htm&date=2006/06/03/&prd=th&


If television and newspaper coverage of the anti-reservation agitation
was indulgent and one-sided, the lack of diversity in the newsroom is
surely a major culprit.



MY FIRST brush with caste prejudice in higher education came in 1999,
when a group of Dalit students from the University College of Medical
Sciences (UCMS) came to see me at my office in another English
newspaper where I worked at the time as an editorial writer.

The students were residents of the hostel and had silently borne the
brunt of casteist abuse and discrimination for some time. Whether by
happenstance or design, the Scheduled Caste students were confined to
two floors and not assigned rooms elsewhere in the building. In the
dining hall, they were forced by the forward caste majority to sit
together at one end. If a Dalit student sat somewhere else, he would
be abused. "Bloody shaddu," one of them was told when he sat amidst
others by mistake, "you cannot eat with us."

The Dalits put up with this harassment and humiliation because, as one
of their parents told them, "you have to become a doctor at any cost."
But the abuse eventually turned to violence and when one of the
students was badly beaten and another had his room ransacked, they
decided to go on a dharna. This is also when they ended up in my
office.

After hearing them out, I requested the head of the Metro section to
send someone to UCMS to cover the story. I was promised a reporter
would be sent soon. Several days went by but nothing appeared. It
turned out no reporter was assigned. I tried again, this time going
one notch higher in the editorial chain-of-command. Again there was no
response. Eventually, I decided to do the story myself. I spent
half-a-day at the college, interviewed the college authorities, the
students on dharna as well as the general category students. One of
them admitted reluctantly to using the slur `shaddu' for the Scheduled
Caste students but only as a `pet name'.

I filed the story but it did not appear the next day or the day after.
Nobody ever said the story was not interesting or not up to scratch
but for some reason space could never be found. The story finally
appeared, in a cut and mutilated form, a full month after the Dalit
students began their dharna. Needless to say, the travails of the
Dalit students at UCMS were not considered newsworthy enough by other
newspapers or by any of the news channels.

I narrate this story because of how it contrasts with the
extraordinary indulgence the national media showed the nearly
month-long anti-reservation agitation of doctors and medical students
at AIIMS and other colleges. Despite the 24x7 presence of TV cameras,
the daily protests in favour of reservation by AIIMS doctors and staff
under the banner of `Medicos Forum for Equal Opportunities' were
virtually blacked out. One channel showed the counter-protest last
Sunday only when a `citizen journalist' presented it with footage he
had shot. Often, it was impossible to separate the breathless TV
reporters from the anti-reservation doctors they were reporting about.
The insensitive and casteist forms of protest some of them adopted —
the `symbolic' sweeping of streets, the shining of shoes, the singing
of songs warning OBCs and others to `remember their place' (`apni
aukat mein rahio') — were put on air without comment by the channels.
Nobody asked what kind of doctors these `meritorious' students were
likely to become if they had such contempt towards more than half the
population of India. And in a media discourse which routinely reports
the protests of the underprivileged only as "traffic jams" and other
disruptions to the "normal" life of the city, the suffering of poor
patients as a result of the AIIMS strike figured largely as a footnote
to the "heroic" struggle the medical students and junior doctors were
waging.

Amidst the hysteria induced by the media coverage, no one cared to
point out how indulgent the AIIMS authorities themselves were being
towards the anti-reservation strike. Earlier this year, when a section
of doctors concerned about higher user fees being imposed on poor
patients sought to protest, they were warned of dire consequences.
Under the terms of a High Court order, no protest or demonstration is
permitted within the AIIMS campus. Yet nobody demurred when the
anti-reservation students occupied the lawns, put up shamianas and
coolers and received the "solidarity" of traders, event managers, and
IT employees (whose employers usually ban their own staff from ever
striking work.)

While there were honourable exceptions — Outlook, The Hindu , and
Frontline among them, as well as individual reporters in some
newspapers and channels — would the media's coverage have been more
balanced had there been a greater degree of caste diversity in the
newsroom and editorial boards of our newspapers and channels? Put
another way, in egging the forward caste students on to oppose any
extension of reservation, were forward caste editors and reporters
reflecting their own personal impatience with the idea of affirmative
action? Was the media coverage, then, a display of trade unionism by
the privileged?

There are no official or industry statistics but every journalist is
aware of the extent to which forward castes dominate the media. When
B.N. Uniyal surveyed the scene in 1996, he found not a single Dalit
accredited journalist in Delhi. Today, the position is unlikely to be
much better. At a recent meeting of Journalists for Democracy, it was
reported that an informal survey had found that the number of
accredited North Indian OBC journalists in Delhi was under 10. I
myself have counted the number of Muslims with accreditation to the
Press Information Bureau and they barely cross the three per cent
mark. In Chhattisgarh, a recent attempt to send Tribal journalists on
a training programme had to be dropped because there was none.

One is not saying the absence of Dalit or OBC journalists is the
product of conscious discrimination though that factor cannot be ruled
out. But the reality of their absence is something the media must have
the courage to acknowledge.

In an ideal world where professionalism is paramount, the caste or
religious affiliation of a journalist should not matter. But
journalism that has little or no space for the majority of citizens is
bound to end up missing out on the complexity of the society it seeks
to cover. Story ideas will not be taken up, or if taken up then
covered only from a particular perspective. To be sure, many of the
negative trends so evident in Indian journalism — the shrinkage of
space, the lack of coverage of rural India or of the problems of poor
Indians, the episodic, frenetic nature of news, the cult of the
Sensex, the preoccupation with trivia and sensationalism — will not be
cured by newspapers and TV channels hiring more Dalit, OBC, and Muslim
journalists. But greater workplace diversity will certainly infuse a
greater degree of vitality in the newsroom as wider varieties of lived
experience intrude upon and clash with the largely urban, rich,
forward caste Hindu certitudes of the overwhelming majority of
journalists.

Far from seeing affirmative action as a threat, India's media houses
should look upon the entry of Dalit, Tribal, OBC, and Muslim
journalists as an opportunity to broadbase their journalism and make
it more professional and authentic. Last year, Ankur and Sarai-CSDS
provided teenagers in the now-demolished slum cluster of Nangla Machi
with computers. The daily diaries and fly-sheets they produced even as
their homes were being brought down by bulldozers is journalism of as
high a quality as anyone can find in India today (Interested readers
should visit http://www.sarai.net/nm.htm). Certainly their writings
tell us more about the reality of "slum clearance" than any of our TV
channels, and in prose that is better than what one normally gets to
read in our newspapers.

As the OBC and SC-ST youths who want to become doctors and engineers
are saying, merit is not simply a score that can be bought by parents
who have the money to invest in the most expensive education for their
children. It is also about the talent that all children have within
them regardless of their caste or socio-economic background. A society
— or an industry like the media — which does not find a way to tap
that talent will only end up impoverishing itself. Specifically, media
houses must seriously think about starting internships and training
programmes for Dalit, Tribal, Muslim, and OBC students interested in
becoming journalists.

Reservation, affirmative action, targeted expenditure, and investment
are all means of society helping people unlock their inherent talent.
As pro-reservation scholars such as Yogendra Yadav, Satish Deshpande,
Purshottam Aggarwal, and others have argued, the United Progressive
Alliance Government's current approach is not necessarily the best
one. But by conducting a shrill campaign and encouraging forward caste
students to launch an ill-conceived agitation, the media themselves
foreclosed the possibility of a rational debate on what the best way
of building an inclusive education system really is. When the dust
settles, the media should introspect and ask what they can do to make
society as a whole more inclusive. Encouraging conversation and not
hectoring is one way. But another is surely to diversify the newsroom
by consciously bringing in those sections of society who have hitherto
been excluded. There are a million stories out there waiting to be
told. If only we allow the storytellers to do the telling.