[Reader-list] (Fwd) Muslim ‘Terrorists’ Manufactured By The Media By Yoginder Sikand (Countercurrents.org)

[Venugopalan K M]

 ".*..In an incident in coastal Karnataka, after two Muslim men were paraded
naked and brutally assaulted in public by Hindu Yuva Sena activists for
transporting cows, a Muslim protest rally was taken out in Udipi. Kannada
papers falsely alleged that the demonstrators had unfurled a Pakistani flag
and raised pro-Pakistan slogans and, without any evidence, accused them of
being linked to Al-Qaeda and the Lashkar-e Tayyeba. Although the police
denied these claims, the papers pressed on with their accusations. In
another bizarre case, a Muslim man from Bangalore associated with the Muslim
IT Association was wrongly accused by the Times of India of being linked to
a terrorist organization. Despite these blatant falsehoods, the report notes
with distress, in the overwhelming majority of cases the newspapers did not
issue any apologies or acknowledge their (possibly deliberate) errors...."
**


* Muslim ‘Terrorists’ Manufactured By The Media

By Yoginder Sikand

26 August, 2009
Countercurrents.org

It is not just the ‘loony’ ‘vernacular’ media, as many are given to believe,
but even the ‘respectable’, ‘mainstream’, ‘national’ English-language press
in India that have sedulously cultivated the notion of ‘Islamic terrorism,’
so much so that the image of Muslims in general being either terrorists or
their sympathizers enjoys wide currency today. While it is true that some of
the most dastardly terror attacks that India has witnessed in recent years
have been the handiwork of some Muslims—and this is something that the vast
majority of the Indian Muslims themselves deplore—it is also undeniable that
Muslims have been unfairly blamed for many other attacks or alleged ‘terror
plots’ by the police as well as the media in which they have had no role to
play at all. Many Muslims—and others, too—believe that these false
allegations are not innocent errors, but can be said to represent a
deliberate and concerted effort to defame and demonise an entire community
and the religion with which it is associated.

That, precisely, is what a recently-released report, brought out by a team
of secular, leftist non-Muslim activists from Karnataka argues. Titled
‘Media on Terror’, and issued by the activist group ‘Column 9’ [so named,
the report says, because in a standard newspaper of eight columns, issues
and perspectives that deserve a column of their own generally go missing),
it is a detailed examination of the coverage and projection of ‘terrorism’
in the state of Karnataka. It is based on an analysis of the reporting of
‘terrorism’ in the Bangalore editions of leading Kannada and English
newspapers over several months in 2008, supplemented with in-depth
interviews with journalists, stringers and police officials in Honnali,
Davangere, Hubli, Kalghatgi and Bangalore—places where, the media had
reported, ‘terrorists’—all of them incidentally Muslims—had been
apprehended. This was a period when the media was awash with stories of
Muslim ‘terrorists’ allegedly plotting to ‘take over’ the whole of
Karnataka.

A striking finding of the report is that the media in Karnataka, both
Kannada and English, ‘dangerously seemed to pronounce judgments on those
arrested, much before the due process of law was played out’. In fact, the
report says, there was ‘no material basis to most of the news reports’. The
tone of their reporting was sharply ‘jingoistic’, and ‘none of the
standards’ expected of professional journalism ‘seemed to be in evidence’.
Alleged terrorists—in many cases innocent Muslim youths arbitrarily picked
up by the police—were subjected to ‘media trials’ based simply on
unsubstantiated police claims. The report speaks of ‘the blurring of lines
between police officials and investigative journalists, who seemed to
pre-empt “official” investigation.’ The language and rhetoric used in the
reporting reflected, the report says, an obvious and deep-rooted bias
against Muslims, and a deliberate effort to create a sense of siege among
Hindus.

Scores of sensational stories of Muslims being picked up for being
‘suspected’ terrorists published in the Karnataka media were based on
information allegedly received from what were routinely called ‘highly
placed police officials’ or ‘intelligence bureau officials’. Predictably,
the report says, the names of these police or investigating officials were
not provided, which meant that these stories—many of which were patently
fabricated—could not be substantiated by these officials. In numerous
instances, the reports were based on ‘news’ wholly manufactured by reporters
and stringers, as evidenced from the denials that emerged from the police
officials themselves a day after these reports were published, which many
papers chose to ignore. In almost all such cases, the newspapers did not
bother to issue an apology despite irrefutable confirmation of their
falsity. In most instances where the stories about alleged Muslim terrorists
were based on information supplied by the police, journalists simply asked
no questions at all as to the process of investigation that took place
within the police stations despite it being common knowledge that torture is
widely used by the police in such cases to extract information or else to
force detainees to admit to crimes that they have had no hand in.
Consequently, the arrested Muslims were uncritically presented in the media
as ‘hardcore Islamist terrorists’, even without the courts having made their
judgments. By presenting no version other than that of the police, the
report remarks, the ‘investigative’ aspect of journalism in Karnataka on the
matter of alleged Muslim involvement in ‘terrorism’ has in fact been reduced
to what it calls ‘stenographic reporting’. The report adds that the few
journalists who tried to balance the stories with the other views about
reported incidents about Muslim ‘terrorism’ or foiled ‘terrorist plots’
rarely found space in the newspapers.

In this regard, it is significant to note that, as the report says, it was
mainly at the lower-rungs of the police that journalists depended for their
‘stories’ (often, for a price it suggests). The journalists interviewed by
the team that commissioned the report confirmed that to sustain their
relations with police constables they needed to ‘keep them happy’ and desist
from ‘undertaking any steps to antagonize them’. This, the report points
out, greatly affected the credibility of their reports since they assumed
the police version as valid and often failed to critique or to ask any
questions about that version. The report adds:

‘Across the board, journalists specifically mentioned lower rung police
officials, including constables and head constables within the concerned
police stations, as sources of information. The journalists’ access to these
police officials was determined entirely on the basis of their personal
rapport and connections staked out within the police stations. It was fairly
obvious that the journalists nurtured these relationships with the officials
very carefully since the relationships were the base for a potential
“exclusive” story”[…] Despite the team’s repeated questions seeking names of
police officials who acted as sources of information, not a single reporter
was willing to share these details.’
Another alarming finding of the report was the arbitrary branding by both
the police and the media of literature and CDs allegedly seized by the
police from the Muslims who had been arrested as ‘jihadi materials’. These
were presented as ‘proof’ of those arrested as being behind acts of terror
or even as would-be terrorists. In many cases, the police officials simply
refused to share the material with journalists, at most showing them only
photos of the covers of books seized from the arrested Muslims. Amazingly,
the report relates, according to the journalists they interviewed, ‘evidence
of the books indeed being jihadi materials lay in the fact that most were
books written in Urdu.’ In one location where alleged Muslim terrorists had
been arrested and so-called jihadi material recovered from them, journalists
interviewed by the team mentioned that the police had produced a panel of
Urdu experts at a press briefing to confirm that the seized materials were
indeed ‘jihadi’. Strikingly, none of the journalists had any clue about the
identity of these so-called Urdu ‘experts’. A journalist in Honnali spoke
about a particular CD that was seized by the police from an arrested Muslim,
whom the police and the media had alleged was a ‘terrorist’. Far from being
incendiary material, as was alleged, the CD, it turned out, was actually
about an orphanage. Another journalist provided the team that had prepared
the report a photograph taken on a mobile phone, where they could read the
titles of two books since they were printed in English—one of these was ‘The
Spirit of Islam’ and the other was the ‘Holy Quran’, books that, needless to
say, are not proscribed and are readily available in the market. In this
regard, the report rightly asks, ‘How can possession of the Holy Koran be
presented as proof that the people owning them are suspected terrorists? Why
weren’t any questions or objections raised about this new tendency of the
Indian police who chose to present the possession of the Holy Koran as proof
of possible terrorism?’. Thus, the report argues, ‘It was very clear that
the journalists had labeled books and other seized materials primarily on
the basis of their interactions with the police and, to some extent, on the
basis of internalized personal prejudice’.

Yet another striking finding of the report is that not a single journalist
whom the team met and who had reported on the arrest of alleged Muslim
terrorists had received clear instructions or editorial guidelines
pertaining to coverage of sensitive issues such as terrorism from their
respective editorial chiefs. Many journalists spoke of the pressure to meet
the evening deadlines for daily reports, and so, they admitted, there were
several occasions when they did not have the time to verify the claims of
police officials in cases of real or alleged terrorist attacks or plots, and
merely carried police version without cross-checking. Equally distressingly,
the report unveiled, reporters located in regions that usually received no
print space or attention in the press found themselves catapulted to
attention through the sensationalist, and often false, reports that they
filed during the time of the arrests’ and got front page coverage. The
reporters also mentioned the pressure exerted on them by the state bureau
chiefs to file reports that were “exclusive” to the organisation. This
conduced, the report says, to sensationalism and even to the fabrication of
reports. As the report puts it, ‘In the consequent one-upmanship created by
the pressure to perform within the confines of a profit-driven industry, the
journalists admitted to several compromises on the articles’ authenticity
and their contents.’ Some journalists interviewed unanimously admitted that
the reports they had filed were intentionally sensationalist in nature.
According to them, what was of paramount importance was for them to ‘prove’
that the arrested persons were in fact guilty, that they were in fact
members of ‘Islamist terrorist’ organisations, even much before the courts
were given the chance to lay down their verdicts. Sadly, as the report says,
these reporters saw their ‘sensationalist reporting’, not as a crime, but,
rather, as ‘a service that they were rendering to the nation’—they claimed
that in this way they were exposing ‘hardened criminals’ and potential
terrorists who were capable of inflicting much harm to society.

One of the persons interviewed by the team, the reporter for the Kannada
Prabha in Hubli, openly admitted that ‘60% of the reports that he had filed
were false and inaccurate’. Similarly, the Hubli reporter for the Times of
India admitted to using a photograph of an unrelated dargah with his report
about an alleged Muslim terrorist camp, and and falsely described the flag
near the dargah as a Pakistani one. In fact, it so turned out, the
correspondent himself had never been to the location. In an incident in
coastal Karnataka, after two Muslim men were paraded naked and brutally
assaulted in public by Hindu Yuva Sena activists for transporting cows, a
Muslim protest rally was taken out in Udipi. Kannada papers falsely alleged
that the demonstrators had unfurled a Pakistani flag and raised pro-Pakistan
slogans and, without any evidence, accused them of being linked to Al-Qaeda
and the Lashkar-e Tayyeba. Although the police denied these claims, the
papers pressed on with their accusations. In another bizarre case, a Muslim
man from Bangalore associated with the Muslim IT Association was wrongly
accused by the Times of India of being linked to a terrorist organization.
Despite these blatant falsehoods, the report notes with distress, in the
overwhelming majority of cases the newspapers did not issue any apologies or
acknowledge their (possibly deliberate) errors.

The team also met with senior police officials in Bangalore and Davangere.
It found that ‘they appeared to be less concerned and engaged with the
prevention of biased media reporting and introspection into the role of the
police.’ They argued that it was not the responsibility of the police to
challenge inaccurate reports filed by journalists, and that this was also
time-consuming. The SP of Davangere, the report says, ‘readily acknowledged
the leakage of information to the press through the lower rung officials
though they were expressly forbidden from doing so.’ She admitted its
continuance despite the issuing of a whip asking all police officials below
the rank of SP to refrain from interactions with journalists, and suggested
that journalists should depend on official press communiqués released by
SPs.

Among the many cases of false framing of Muslims as ‘terrorists’ in
Karnataka that the report highlights, one deserves special mention to
indicate the deep-rootedness of anti-Muslim prejudices in the state
machinery, particularly since the BJP emerged as such a powerful force in
Karnataka. The team met with judicial officer Jinaralkar at the judicial
magistrate’s first class court at Honnali, where two Muslim youths, Abdullah
and Nasir, had been arrested on grounds of allegedly being terrorists.
Jinaralkar defended his awarding of the two to police custody, although they
were initially arrested and presented as bike thieves, a decision the media
highlighted and lauded, crediting the judge with foresight in identifying
the arrested duo as ‘suspected terrorists’. The judge explained his decision
by stating that the material seized from them when they were arrested
indicated that they might in fact have been terrorists, rather than
bike-robbers as was initially claimed: duplicate identity cards, a dagger, a
map of south India with red marks against Udupi and Goa, an American dollar,
two pieces of paper, with the phrase www.com written on one and ‘Jungle King
Behind Back Me’ on another.

The judge told the team, ‘When I looked at these materials in their
entirety, several things were clear to me. I felt that these were definitely
not just bike thieves—why would bike thieves carry around duplicate identity
cards and a map of south India? The fact that they had an American dollar
seemed to indicate their international links, while the paper with
www.comindicated that they were tech-savvy […] Definitely enough
grounds in my
opinion to grant the police their custody to facilitate their further
investigations’ .


The report indicates that journalists in Karnataka (and this probably holds
true for the rest of the country) typically see terrorism as a specifically
Muslim phenomenon, and do not even consider the possibility of Hindu
‘terrorists’, although, as the report points out, in Karnataka today,
particularly with the rise of the BJP, scores of incidents of terror against
Muslims (as well as Dalits) by Hindu groups have been recorded. Predictably,
the media does not describe these as instances of ‘Hindu terrorism’. This
points to what the report terms as the dangerously marked ‘internalisation
of Hindu nationalism’ by media professionals in Karnataka, and the
projection by the media of the Hindutva lobby as the presumed ‘sole
representative’ of the Hindus.

‘Media on Terror’ can be procured from Column 9, No. 51, 29th Cross, 9th
Main, Banashankari 2nd Stage, Bangalore 560070. Price: Rs. 25.




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nation, you cannot build up a morality. Anything that you will build on the
foundations of caste will crack and will never be a whole.
-AMBEDKAR



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