[Reader-list] RTF (Right to Food) Articles - 14

[Rakesh Iyer]

Source: The Hindu

Date: Sunday, September 02, 2001

Link: http://www.hinduonnet.com/2001/09/02/stories/13020611.htm

Article:

Mass media: Disconnected from mass reality

A high profile fashion week makes news, but starvation deaths do not. And,
paradoxically, to make the headlines, the vulnerable sections of society
have got to die.

Noted journalist *P. SAINATH* examines how the media swing like a pendulum
in times of crisis.

MEDIA hearts bleed best in May. That is when the hard luck stories get done.
Maybe because it is the month when editors and journalists feel
uncomfortable. It is hot.

It is hotter still for landless labourers. But at least they can migrate to
all sorts of places in search of work. (Sadly, their travel agents do not
seem to be able to get them bookings for Kulu Manali.) "Sunlight-based
industries" work in this season. Those in Kalahandi or Bolangir can go to
Vizianagaram or Hyderabad to make bricks. Others can go to work in building
construction or painting. You can earn money making ropes. The heat is
miserable. It is far worse around the furnace of a brick kiln. But you can
earn something.

Once the rains are in, much of the crisis in agriculture is assumed to be
over. After all, was not scarcity of water the problem? (Except, of course,
for the floods.) Hundreds of millions of Indians think "the problem" goes
far beyond these issues. But their views do not count for much.

Right now, if all the agricultural labour unions in the country held a press
conference in Delhi, they would be lucky if half a dozen journalists turn
up. If they marched in lakhs down the streets of the capital, they might
make a photograph and two columns. Never mind that agricultural labour is
the most vulnerable section of the Indian poor. Or that they - meaning tens
of millions of human beings - are at the receiving end of a man-made crisis.
It does not make news. Not much.

Contrast that with the saturation coverage given to the Lakme Fashion Week
in Mumbai early this month. According to the organisers, there were just 250
buyers at the grand show. But there was a large turnout of journalists. No
less than 220 of them. Almost one for every buyer. In some major newspapers,
they produced more copy in a week than the ongoing crisis in the countryside
has in the past few months. On television, spin-off stories from the fashion
week are still continuing, featured every night by many channels. Long after
the 250-buyer event is over.

Anyone tried counting the number of journalists assigned to cover the mess
in agriculture?

In the countryside, it is from August to mid-October, between sowing and
harvest in many States, that the survival games for the poor enter their
sharpest phase. This year, that season unfolds in the midst of a serious
crisis. And it is anyway the period when landless labourers have nothing to
do and nowhere to go. There is no construction work and you cannot make
bricks either. It is raining, there is no work at home and little to be
found elsewhere. No food-for-work or other employment programmes for the
poor in this period. Those peak in May, when the media is still looking.

The moral outrage in the national media over the deaths in Orissa and
elsewhere is good. It means the triumph of elite insensitivity has not been
total. But it misses at least three things. One, the deaths are just a
symptom of a much larger crisis. For every person who dies, there are
millions of others who live on, but in acute hunger. It seems, though, that
only deaths (in significant number) make a story. For every farmer
committing suicide in Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh, there are thousands more
who do not but whose conditions are as miserable. However, to make the
headlines, they have got to die.

Meanwhile, there is something bizarre about watching a moving story on
deaths in Chattisgarh while a corner of the TV screen offers solace in the
Sensex being up by nine points. Maybe the peasants died cheering.

Sadly, the moving stories seem to trigger the "charity" mode in the media.
Why cannot the Government distribute free grain to the poor? It would not
have to if it did not destroy their livelihoods in the first place. And if
it respected their rights and entitlements as citizens. And could see why
the Public Distribution System (PDS) is important. Those mountains of grain
are not huge "surpluses" but the result of destroying the purchasing power
of the poor. People seek justice, not pity.

Second, the media miss, or do not want to see, the link between the distress
in the countryside and the policies of the past decade. Policies so lustily
applauded by the same media.

Sections of the regional press have done a better job than their "national"
counterparts. Local Telugu journalists have looked at the distress in
Anantapur more soberly. They have seen the policy roots of the tragedy
there. The little newsletters of western Orissa have sharply portrayed the
plight of returning migrants. Some migrants would not claim the bodies of
family members who die on the train home for fear of railway police
harassment. These fighting little papers showed how this year's extra heavy
migrations led to crashing wages in the destination cities. They too could
see the link between policy and consequence. Mostly, such journals are owned
by maverick individuals, not by corporate chains.

In the national media, too, both print and television have seen a few
exceptional and outstanding reports from individual journalists. But that is
exactly what they were. Exceptions. The media as an institution cared
little. And such reporters are often sneered at as being "activists".

It needed President K. R. Narayanan, yet again, to draw attention to a basic
fact in his Independence Day speech. What is happening is more than an
aberration. It calls for a big rethink on the country's present direction.

After months, the notion of mountains of grain versus oceans of hunger has
finally begun to sink in. The idea of rotting grain going to the rats has
now invited media criticism and rightly so. Better late than never. Few
though, have commented on the Government's attempts to dump grain in the sea
or export it to other nations, even as hunger rises at home. Fewer still
mentioned that at least two countries rejected the first shipments of grain
that India tried exporting to them. Both dismissed it as "substandard".
Almost none make the link between policy and the disaster.

Both the press and television have reported the Supreme Court's scathing
remarks on State Governments giving absurd and outrageous replies to a
petition on the right to food. The Himachal Pradesh Government asserts there
are no destitutes in that State. Some of the others deny a crisis. It is
good the media reports this at all. But if the State Governments dared to be
so brazen in denying a crisis, it is because they feel they can rely on the
media's own blindness to it. They know they can mostly get away with it. How
much better if those scathing remarks had come from the press before the
Court made them. Unlike the courts, the media have the resources and the
personnel to get out into the countryside and do their own investigations.

The important thing is not just starvation, but also more widespread hunger
and distress. In the past three years, distress suicides have been reported
from Punjab and Haryana. But they have not got even the kind of space or
treatment they would have had they been in Kalahandi. That would break the
stereotype.

In early 1997, the Wall Street Journal gave more space to the farmers'
suicides in A.P. than any major newspaper did here. No Indian magazine
placed those events on its cover. How could we? That would mean undermining
Chandrababu Naidu. Darling of a media that views information technology with
a lot of awe, but little understanding, Naidu has learned well the
shibboleths he needs to mouth from time to time to the media cooing in line.


The third thing the national media misses is a scrutiny of its own
priorities. Can the media help with solutions in this time of rising hunger
and distress? Very little, so long as we peddle the illusion that it has
nothing to do with the policies of the last 10 years. Beating up on
"official callousness" and "administrative neglect" sounds radical but does
not tell the story. "Poor implemention" is another herring that swims on and
on. Quite a bit of the distress in recent times is the result of a rather
aggressive implementation of policy. The destruction of the PDS. The
conscious closure of rural credit. Putting health care even further out of
the reach of the poor than it was before. The cutting of spending on the
poor. These are policies. Not natural calamities.

Powerful sections of the media that once played cheerleaders to Enron and
Associated Electronic Services (AES) speak mildly now about the havoc those
deals have wreaked. But they are still all for ending imagined "subsidies"
in power to poor farmers. There has been no look at the damage caused by
corrupt and wrong-headed "reforms" in this sector to rural India.

It was around 1992 that hunger-related deaths began to resurface in
independent India in a big way, Sure, there had been some incidents
post-1947. But it was after 1991 that the crunch set in. It is in the last
decade that these kinds of deaths have occurred with such frequency. And on
such a scale. That too, in some of the richest States. In 1992, tens of
thousands of poor peasants from Thane, mainly adivasis, marched into Mumbai
in protest. The press mostly came up with the staple photograph and
inevitable caption: "Farmers Demand Remunerative prices".

Actually, those farmers were saying something else. They were saying the
devastation inflicted on the PDS was hurting them. That the collapsing
health system was endangering their lives. That they could not afford the
new costs being inflicted on them. That too, when spending on the poor was
being slashed. Ironically, they ended their march close by to the Stock
Exchange. But we were too busy looking up at the Sensex which had crossed
2,000 - a heady high in those primitive days - to notice the protesters on
the ground.

Two weeks later, 29 children died of hunger-related problems in Thane. The
press duly flayed the Government. A chief minister did the mandatory
helicopter trip to the place. "Erring officials" were "dealt with" in the
headlines and the show went on. With the press attacking "implementation"
but cheering the very policies that had triggered the deaths. Then, too, our
journalism came after deaths. Had we cared at all to listen to the
protesters, some of those children - and many others who have died since -
might have been alive.

We still have a chance to get out there and listen. And maybe save something
more than a fashion week.