A fortnightly column from The Wire’s public editor.

The heartbreaking sobs of the children of the CRPF men killed in Pulwama echo through newsrooms but rarely do they prompt a shift in their central focus: the war cry of avengement. It needs a rare anchor like Ravish Kumar, who on prime time on February 14 – the day of the attack – found the courage to comment on the performance of his counterparts in other channels, “Every incident is not a movie plot where an anchor can shriek and shout and provoke. It is best we pay tribute by staying silent for some time, by talking softly, by thinking of what must be passing through the minds of families (of the dead jawans).”

Meanwhile fighting words like “demonstrable action”, “a response commensurate with the price paid by our men”, “India’s blood is boiling”, “hot pursuit”, “surgical strike”, “payback time” rode the air waves; even as hash tags like #AvengeAwantipora, #PakKeTukdeTukde, #IndiaWantsRevenge circulated frenetically in the digital space.

Sometimes it appeared that television channels and Union ministers were on the same playbook. If one channel floated the hash tag ‘#EndCoverForLobby’, a Union minister excoriated “those living in India and describing themselves as mainstream Kashmir politics” as “apologists for terrorists”.

Deliberative news generation doesn’t stand a chance against such competitive news generation and of course, there is always a certain comfort in similitude. By shouting long and hard, along with everybody else, about giving Pakistan a “muhthod jawab” (jaw-breaking response), you cannot at least be accused of being anti-national. The question is, are such reactions only playing into the hands of those who orchestrated that suicide mission in the first place?

One of the important insights that emerged from the theatres of “terrorist” violence in the West, is how “terrorism” itself is not just an act of violence, it is an act of violence to communicate messages for political purposes; it is an exercise of power that aims to expose the powerlessness of those who rule and to strike fear in the ordinary person.

Seen in this way, it is obvious that the media unwittingly comes to play a role in the realisation of these aims. If any act of terrorist violence remained confined only to those who suffer as a consequence of it, it is of little use to those who perpetrated it. It is only when its impacts permeate through civil society and provoke counter-reactions to varying degrees is the purpose achieved.

Could it then be the case that the media unwittingly came to play a role in the realisation of the terrorists’ ultimate intention? As Alexander Spencer, author of The Tabloid Terrorist, in a 2012 paper titled, ‘Terrorism and the Media’, put it:

The modern news media, as the principal conduit of information about such acts, thus play a vital part in the terrorists’ calculus. Indeed, without the media’s coverage the act’s impact is arguably wasted, remaining narrowly confined to the immediate victim(s) of the attack rather than reaching the wider ‘target audience’ at whom the terrorists’ violence is actually aimed.

Incidentally, groups like the Jaish-e-Mohammed, have learnt to harness effectively both media content and modern communications technologies for its purpose. Consider, for a moment, how the suicide bomber in Pulwama, Adil Ahmad Dar, clad in fatigues, performed for the camera. The video revealing that he had joined the fidayeen squad a year earlier and which praised the Kashmiri people, particularly the youth, for remaining on the “path of freedom despite immense suffering”, was released on social media just before the attack (‘J&K: At Least 49 CRPF Jawans Killed in Deadliest Militant Strike on Security Forces’, February 15) and must have got a wide viewing.

Spencer also looks at how metaphors used by the media like “war” also further the terrorist enterprise, inevitably making a military response to the terror act seem the only recourse. The disturbing aspect of all this is that the media too stand to gain from violent situations of this kind in terms of visibility and support. Spencer writes of “an almost symbiotic relationship between terrorism and the media as terrorism provides for exciting and violent stories which help sell the news product and the media provides terrorist groups with a means of spreading their message and creating fear among the general public”.

Given this, the advisory put out by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, (‘After Pulwama Attack, I&B Ministry Tells Channels Not to ‘Promote Anti-National Attitudes‘, February 14) was a rather uncommon instance of the I&B ministry actually getting something right. “Anti-national content” in this note referenced anything affecting the “integrity of the nation”, and presumably it includes media content that pits community against community and deepens alienation in regions that witness such violence.

One of the conspicuous silences in the media narrative is the alienation of the Kashmiri. The Wire‘s article, ‘After Pulwama Attack, the Core Issue in Kashmir Is Being Ignored – Again’ (February 15) rightly flags this. The writer argues that if the state can introspect on the phenomenon of local Kashmiris – many of them from educated and better-of backgrounds – willing to blow themselves up for the cause, it would go some way in addressing the problem of such randomised acts of devastating violence.

Unfortunately, this is never done in the most conducive of times, forget those that precede a general election.

Reader responses to the CRPF attack

The Pulwama attack has left many readers of The Wire extremely disturbed. The first among them was Sonali, who has even written a letter to the “Prime Minister of India, Other Officials and Citizens of India in the wake of the yesterday happened terrorist attack in J&K”. Kushal Kumar, another reader based in Haryana, also sent us early information on the attack, almost in real time.

Security agencies inspect the site of the Pulwama suicide bomb attack. Credit: PTI

Delhi police should read Anirban

What was most striking about the crackdown on JNU in 2016 was how those who faced the brunt of the state repression and were subjected to slurs like “anti-national”, “tukde tukde gang” and “urban naxals”, emerged from that trial of fire so much stronger and launched political and intellectual responses that have deepened Indian democracy.

The piece, ‘JNU Sedition Row: Age of Unreason and ‘Reasonable Restrictions’’ (February 9), by Anirban Bhattacharya, one of the former JNU students facing sedition charges filed by the Delhi police, reflects this amazing “growth” story. The piece becomes even more relevant, given recent developments at the Aligarh Muslim University (‘‘No Evidence’ of Sedition, Charge Against 14 AMU Students Will be Dropped: Police’; ‘Watch | Operation Sedition: Is AMU Being Targeted the Way JNU Was?’, February 15).

Bhattacharya notes its timing, “90 days before the general elections” and its intended impact in newsrooms, to the extent that some sections of the media were “handed copies of the charge sheet even before the accused have had any luck in receiving it”.

By revisiting the Constituent Assembly conversations around “sedition”, and considerations of what constituted “reasonable restrictions” to freedom of expression, he could exhume lost voices from that era. Professor K.T. Shah, for instance, was “sceptical of the limits imposed in the name of ‘public order and morality’ pointing out that the term morality is highly vague and its connotation changes from over time, and how in its guise basic freedoms have been denied in several countries”.

Somnath Lahiri, a member of the CPI and representative from Bengal, had even appealed to the house to delete the word ‘“sedition” from the ambit of “reasonable restrictions”’, by stating:

I am constrained to say that these are fundamental rights from a police constable’s point of view and not from the point of view of a free and fighting nation… Now, Sir, what constitutes a ‘grave emergency’ God alone knows. It will depend on the executive obtaining at a particular period of government. So, naturally anything that the party in power or the executive may not like would be considered a grave emergency and the very meagre fundamental rights which are conceded will be whittled down.

How prescient those words were, and how ignored, despite the Supreme Court having laid downthat seditious speech becomes a punishable offence only when it incites mobs into imminent violent action. The Delhi police, as indeed the Pune police with their ever present manacles to shackle those who, in its imagination, are “urban naxals”, would be advised to read Bhattacharya’s piece to understand better the foundational insights that have fashioned democracy in India – and the intellectual calibre of those they seek to silence.

Former JNU students Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, who are facing sedition charges. Credit: PTI

Death threat to Swati Chaturvedi condemned

The UN Special Rapporteurs on cultural rights; extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions; the right to freedom of opinion and expression; violence against women; and the Working Group on the issue of discrimination against women in law and in practice, have jointly written to the government of India, drawing its attention to threats, including death threats, against Swati Chaturvedi, a journalist and columnist, who has been writing for The Wire, expressing their concerns that “the alleged threats, including death threats and threats of rape, received by Ms. Chaturvedi”…”seem to be linked to her journalistic work and criticism of Government policies”:

We are also concerned by the apparent lack of steps taken to investigate the threats despite them having been reported to the Police. We are also concerned about what appears to be a wide presence of fundamentalist discourses and intolerance, including from members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which may encourage negative social mobilization leading to expression of intolerance, incitement to hatred, violence, including gender-based violence, as well as discriminatory practices against women and the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes that are inherently discriminatory and undermine a full range of women’s human rights in all spheres Furthermore, we are concerned by the undermining of freedom of expression based on the lack of measures taken to create a safe and an enabling environment for freedom of expression, in particular for women, including in the online space.

In view of the urgency of the matter, we call on your Excellency’s Government to investigate the threats and take all necessary measures to ensure the safety and security of Ms. Chaturvedi and would appreciate a response on the initial steps taken to safeguard her human rights in compliance with international human rights instruments and standards.

A reader of The Wire, Denish Patel, has sent in an important mail on Gujarat’s gochar land (grazing areas): “First of all thank you for creating such an independent media model. One of the issues that I think you should take up is on gochar land, because I suspect there is a huge scam taking place concerning such commons. I myself am a resident of a town on the banks of the Tapi river. We have had abundant gochar lands here but now politicians (many of them belonging to the ruling party) have captured these commons and have even built houses on them. This points to the ultimate irony: while politicians do politics in the name of the cow and beef eating, they do not bother for a moment the pastures that keep cows alive.”

Write to [email protected]

source: The Wire

The 16th Lok Sabha Elections in 2014 represented something of a watershed in the country’s politics, with the campaign juggernaut fronted by the present prime minister, Narendra Modi, estimated as one of the most expensive ever in the history of the world.

Its basic template was the Obama elections of 2008 and 2016. Obama groupie Rahaf Harfoush, in a slim volume about the 2008 poll, Yes We Did, An Inside Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand, wrote how no less than 16 social networks were used, including the now notorious Facebook. The trick here was that while this social media campaign was widespread, it was also intimate – seeming to speak personally to each individual voter in amazing ways.

We now know that it was the data provided by users on social media sites that allowed and furthered this intimacy, something that the Narendra Modi campaign of 2014 was also able to do. In fact, so exceedingly well did it do this, that the BJP’s youth vote – a cohort most likely to be influenced by social media – shot up conspicuously in that election.

I find, therefore, the huffing and puffing of Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union minister of law and justice  as well as electronics and information technology, laughable. He says, “Footprints of Congress-Cambridge Analytica ties were visible during the Gujarat assembly elections. It ran a poisonous and divisive campaign.” 

Arrey sahab, the Congress is just playing catch up by adapting to a manner of campaigning that was perfected by your party (‘As Congress, BJP Trade Blows Over Cambridge Analytica, Facts Go Out the Window’, March 14). What’s more, they are still novices at this game, as the string of election duds they have garnered of late would seem to indicate.

We now know that Cambridge Analytics, through its Indian partner Ovelina Business Intelligence,was vested with the onerous task of getting the BJP to achieve its mission “272 +”, by a combination of managing and influencing voters through data, including Facebook data.

As The Wire explainer (from the platform, The Conversation, titled  ‘Facebook Is Killing Democracy With Its Personality Profiling Data’, March 22) delineates: “Analysing these data, Cambridge Analytica determined topics that would intrigue users, what kind of political messaging users were susceptible to, how to frame the messages, the content and tone that would motivate users, and how to get them to share it with others. It compiled a shopping list of traits that could be predicted about voters.”

The whistle blowing over Cambridge Alnalytics is for the good. At least some of what lies behind the smoke-and-mirrors routine that delivers election verdicts is now becoming more discernible to us, the common voter.

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As many of you may have noticed, The Wire has gone in for a change of format. The responses to it have generally been good and users have commented positively on how the liberal use of white space heightens the ease of browsing and helps them in zeroing in on content of choice.  

A functioning and function-able content management system enables readers with multifarious preferences to access a news platform in a spirit of both collaboration and difference. Someone may find the video content put out compelling; someone else may be a news junkie; one may like to retrieve something from an archive; another, interested in an explainer. A good design should accommodate itself to all these various needs in an easy-to-access manner.

But changes of any kind require mental adjustments and reversing the patterns of habit. Most news portals in India began with the prototype of a newspaper and then adapted it for the virtual space. But there is a dilemma here: the virtual space is fluid and doesn’t submit itself to the boundaries of day and night or even that of today and tomorrow.

The Wire, in its earlier avatar, had a clearly defined dateline from the moment the story was put out, which is we know an important feature of any report in a newspaper. It made sense for print media, operating over a 24-hour cycle, to do this. A cyber portal does not have these fixed demarcations. Since everything is virtual here, including temporality, the news cycle itself becomes elastic, with minutes flowing into hours flowing into days flowing into weeks, and so on.  So most news portals adopt what is known as reverse chronology. Information indicating that a particular story was uploaded 22 minutes ago is indicated as against another that saw the light of day 22 hours earlier. This forces the user to reconsider her/his relationship with the flow of news and it is only when the story is archived does its date appear.

Here one can also note that a platform like The Wire is perhaps not the first option for people looking to check the latest news breaks. But it is (or should be) a site where people go to to check the authenticity of news. This means that the team at The Wire would have to do the necessary due diligence before going public with its content, even if it means delaying a story (although the idea is to cut down on these lags as much as possible).

In the fluid architecture of a virtual platform, the second marker is the subject category. On this count, I believe the present format is laid out better, allowing a fairer play of all the stories on offer. The segmentation of these various elements catering to specific interests will certain enhance user comfort with the site over time. I particularly liked the fact that the Hindi and Urdu sites come up at a click of the mouse. The ‘Top Stories’, that highlight four pieces in a loop, is also a useful way to give maximum play to each one of these stories.

But in providing such a moveable feast of content, is The Wire guilty of weighing down the cover page with too many elements?

One reader, Hari, seems to think so: “I am writing as a member of a growing WhatsApp discussion group on current affairs that currently consists of 32 members. A majority of us strongly feel that The Wire‘s new home page layout is cluttered and hence puts off serious readers who lack the time to forage for articles. We are reminded of the earlier existence of a column on the home page listing all published articles which was very useful to us. Unfortunately the new home page omits such a column/listing. Even the new ‘RECENT STORIES’ column at the bottom of the home page does not have a complete listing. For example, your competitor Scroll.in has a complete listing of all published articles at https://scroll.in/latest/. I therefore request The Wire to add a similar link to benefit those of us who are short of time.”

Does this merit some fine tuning of the new format? I would say yes. A founder editor at the The Wire, while arguing that the new format plays to the strengths of the portal given its variegated content, acknowledges that anything new comes with “teething troubles”. But he is optimistic that things will stabilise in a month or so and hopefully the glitches that readers are now experiencing will eventually disappear.

Do keep filling me in with your thoughts on the new format.

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By any measure in normal times, an interview like the one that senior television anchor and journalist Arfa Khanum Sherwani conducted with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar for The Wire would have been recognised for the professional way in which it was conducted: sharp, focused and newsworthy (‘Interview: Sri Sri Ravi Shankar on Faith vs Constitution in Ayodhya’, March 14).

It is in the public interest to know why Sri Sri Ravi Shankar had taken upon himself the job of mediating on a matter that is now firmly in the domain of the courts, and that too at a politically fraught moment in the history of the country which is facing a general election. It is not unreasonable to ask why a spiritual guru should assume the self-appointed role of representing the entire Hindu community and suggesting that if the court verdict went against what is projected as its interests, the country would face a civil war like situation.

It is also not unreasonable to ask why Sri Sri Ravi Shankar was making what was essentially a land title dispute a matter of faith. Should not a man as influential as he, actually counsel his large following to abide by the decision of the court? When an argument made by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar appears to recall the ideology of V.D. Savarkar, is it not unreasonable for an interviewer to ask about this remarkable synergy? 

But these are not normal times. The moment the interviewer posed a question about Savarkar, it seemed to have touched a raw nerve in the spiritual guru and he tried to remove his mike saying, “You cannot pull me into all this.”

It is what happened next that was sought to be framed as a conspiracy against the godman by his followers and other interested groups. The Wire version of the events was that as soon as this moment was reached, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s followers, as if on cue, switched off one of the two cameras – the one focused on him.

When The Wire highlighted this while uploading the interview on its site, it occasioned a particularly ugly online campaign against it, with the hashtag #WireThe Liar made to go viral. What was particularly offensive about this campaign was not just its attempt to polarise the controversy with political elements, including noted trolls of the ruling party, jumping into the fray, but physical threats being issued to the senior woman journalist at the centre of the storm. This is absolutely disgraceful and outrightly condemnable.

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Ralph Rau, an NRI who supports independent journalism, finds it difficult to accept that anyone interested in independent journalism would need to disclose an Aadhaar number, or even PAN number, to subscribe to The Wire. He adds, “I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Scroll.inaccepts subscriptions as does Newslaundry. May I recommend that thewire.in too launches subscriptions like the others do.”

Reader Jaise Joseph, writes that he used to follow news from The Wire: “…for easy access of all the news websites I follow, I have subscribed to the RSS feeds and view the content on a mobile application.” But of late he has noticed that the feeds from thewire.in are not getting new content. He would like to know if this news portal has discontinued RSS feeds. If it is only a technical issue, he hopes it will be resolved soon.

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It demands commendable courage and resilience to take on your supervisor and head of department and the JNU students who went public over the sexual harassment they had faced at the hands of their supervisor and head of department (‘JNU Professor Arrested in Sexual Harassment Case, Gets Bail’ and ‘JNU’s #MeToo Moment And Confronting 2 Years’ Worth of Administrative Failures’, March 21) won our complete admiration and support. What was striking in their account was how sexual predators appear to thrive in closed and controlled spaces such as college and university labs.

A mail arrived in my inbox some days ago, entitled ‘An open letter regarding the sexual harassment case filed against a certain head of a science department in the University of Delhi’, from someone who self-defines herself as “a bright student of the university (who is aggrieved to see the state of affairs in the university today)”. The writer of the letter is actually speaking up for former classmates in her department who are deeply troubled by a particular head of departments’s “lecherous activities perturbing the university environment which troubled the female students and the female teachers equally.”

Fear, she argues, is what allows such impunity: “Fear of landing up without enrolment is one of the reasons to stay silent against this offence; the other well-known reason is honour protection of the unmarried victim. The families remain unsupportive and thus the victim silently suffers or withdraws her will to file a complaint against such demonic teachers. It is a result of such unsafe, unsupportive and ignorant environment that such activities today prevail in an academic institution (one the country’s elitist institution) flagrantly and conspicuously, unchecked.”

What is shocking about this instance is that this particular individual is known to be involved in several such cases. He has been questioned by every member of the department. Yet the man continues to stays on his perch undisturbed. This, she argues, calls into question the role of appointing committees of the university and, ultimately, the university itself.

She ends on a particularly passionate note: “How is it that a teacher, who is supposed to help students learn, is so heavily armed with such ammunition that can harm and settle someone else’s career? Why is a man who is drowning in a pool of such serious allegations still sitting on the chair? Why hasn’t he been asked to resign or has been suspended till the charges are sorted? The ICC and the university administration need to clarify all these doubts for the students and the victims. The course of the action should be swift on this grave urgent case.”

A solidarity statement on sexual harassment issued by the Women Against Sexual Violence and State Repression (WSS) cited some very striking statistics: according to the Ministry of Human Resource Development, there has been a 50% increase in reported cases of sexual harassment in universities and colleges across the country in the year 2017 as compared to the previous year.Simultaneously institutions set up after long years of struggle to check these crimes are being run down. It notes that “the Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) which have been recently constituted under the Sexual Harassment at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition, and Redressal) Act, 2013 do not consist of democratically elected representatives and its recommendations remain non-binding. This undermines not only the autonomy of the ICCs from administrative control and interference but also blunts the capacity of the institution to effectively challenge the existing power structures.”

The JNU ICC is a “glaring example of how students were compelled to approach the police and had to go through the further trauma of dealing with a recalcitrant state machinery.” There are a few significant exceptions to this as well, as the WSS statement noted: the Ambedkar University Delhi inquiring into a case involving law professor Lawrence Liang, who was held guilty of sexual harassment by its internal Committee for the Prevention of Sexual Harassment (CPSH), was one such.

Writing out, speaking out, is helping to upend untenable equations of power within labs, within classrooms, within universities. Listen up to the silence as it roars in our ears.

source: https://thewire.in

The most important image of women in the media was their “non-image”: Margaret Gallagher’s succinct formulation dating back to 1981 inspired some of us in journalism to look a little closer at what was then termed as “women’s representation in the media”.  The obverse side of that non-representation, we discovered soon enough, was the deliberately constructed “on-image”. An image, always on, that conformed to market requirements, patriarchal assumptions, or both. As the song went, being so much older then, we thought we were wise enough to correct such representations by systematically critiquing them. That was how the Women and Media Committee of the Bombay Union of Journalists actually sent a team comprising Meena Menon, Geeta Seshu and Sujata Anandan to Deorala, Rajasthan in 1987, because we were so dismayed by the reportage on the sati incident. Meanwhile, three of us — Padma Prakash, Teesta Setalvad and myself — pored over stacks of newspapers and magazines for days to “review press coverage” on the Roop Kanwar burning. Our “findings” were published in a small pamphlet and gave us a triumphant sense of having countered the media-fueled avalanche that glorified the tragic event.

How audacious, we were, how delusional. Over the next few years the media had emerged as the prime site for the consolidation of both markets and religio-nationalism in the country, with gender playing a pivotally symbolic role. Interesting, therefore, to read Professor Maitrayee Chaudhuri observe in a interview given to The Wire that the “hypervisibility” of women in the media today does not “necessarily add up to a greater gender-just society” (‘Interview: ‘We Have Shifted From an Era of Invisibility of Women to Hypervisibility in Media’, March 1).

What we do have is a flourishing of third generation feminism in the online space by young women journalists who intuitively understand the importance of the stuff that does not figure in mainstream media. ‘Feminism in India’, self-defines itself as “an intersectional feminist platform that amplifies voices of women & the marginalised using art, media, culture, tech & community”, while another, ‘Ladies Finger’, sees itself as “delivering fresh and witty perspectives on politics, culture, health, sex, work and everything in between…” We can only hope that such attempts at defying the mighty mainstream may just be harbingers of more gender equal, less power-driven, media content. After all, to borrow from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, “We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”

And the gaps within stories, is also important, one could add. It is often only when those who live in the gaps within the story come into view, that the story itself acquires life. Recently we have had a spate of news reports about UP chief minister Adityanath’s police which, having borrowed a bloody page from the Mumbai Police’s killer squad of the 1990s, are now busy eliminating people in cold blood in the name of fighting crime. Most of these news reports come with a patina of approval over how the chief minister is being tough on local mafias, each one of them read as if it was a drafted in a police chowki. They make you wonder whether the reporters behind them had even a nodding acquaintance with the Constitution.

Do they realise that such “officially authorized” blood-letting is a complete violation of a civilised criminal justice system?  It is against such an apology for news stories that The Wire feature on encounter killings in Shamli district must be read (‘A Chronicle of the Crime Fiction That is Adityanath’s Encounter Raj’, February 24). It is not just the aggregation of 14 cases of encounter murders in the district of Shamli and a careful documentaton of the chilling, cookie-cutter pattern that marks the killings, that is valuable. Its strength comes from the women who live in the gaps of this story — wives and mothers of the dead men, rife with grief, anger and helplessness. If there is one story that should remove the celebratory smirk on the face of the state’s chief minister that currently adorns a UP government poster showcasing his “1038 encounters”, it is this one. Such a story also testifies to the twinning between gender representation in the media as professionals and gender representation in media content. Being a woman journalist allowed the reporter in this case to go beyond the front door and enter the rooms where women sit on charpoys and weep.

Ditto for stories on female genital mutilation (FMG) which, we had always maintained, took place in Egypt or Sudan. It was over the last year or so that, thanks to the hard work of some women within the community, that we now know that FMG is not alien to India. These activists have subsequently set up the ‘Speak Out on FGM’ collective (‘Voices of Resistance Against Female Genital Mutilation in India Grow Louder’, December 24, 2017).  The collection of data through a year- long study now reveals a far larger presence of FMG in the country than previously thought (‘With Data, an Attempt to Lift the Veil of Secrecy Around Female Genital Mutilation’, February 7).

It is not just the Suleimani and Alvi Bohras that practice FMG, but Dawoodis and some sub-sects in Kerala. What is shocking is that the Narendra Modi government has denied the existence of the practice in India. Why? Surely the Union Women and Child Development Ministry should respond to an inquiry report that had in-depth  interviews conducted with 94 people from the community? Could it be a “vote bank” issue here? After all, the Bohras have on occasion been used to buttress Modi’s secular credentials, some even being flown to locations such as Madison Square to hear first-hand the prime minister’s many orations on foreign soil.

Therefore when BJP’s women ministers carpet bomb the media with their long pieces on this government’s women-centric development or the prime minister tweets that women “continue to inspire generations”, what really does all this mean? When 8-year-old from the Bakarwal community in Jammu is found raped and murdered, allegedly by a local police officer, and local BJP cadres come out on the streets waving tricolours protesting the arrest of a “nationalist”,  we need to unpack this communally spawned outrage. When the Goa chief minister says women drinking beer is disturbing him (‘Goa’s Biggest Problem Really That Women Drink Beer?’, February 11), we need to ask him why he doesn’t demonstrate the same concern about the drug mafia destroying lives in his state. When three-year-old girls are exposed to toxic words directed at the Muslim community (‘Our Three-year-Old Daughter Should Know What it Means to be Hindu, Right From her Childhood’, February 7), we need to interrogate where this Hindutva model of “women’s empowerment” is taking us.

What can be stated with certainty is that it is not from such a space that “bad girls” who challenge the system emerge (‘Forget the Binary of ‘Good Girl’ or ‘Bad Girl’, the New Women Against Sexual Violence Are Here’, March 3). Or if they do, it would need the persistence of those admirable young women of a Haryana university (‘How Girls in Rohtak’s Maharshi Dayanand University Rose Against Curfew Timings, and Won’, February 28) who defied the attempts of university authorities to keep them like caged birds in hostel rooms until they are ready to be delivered to their prospective husbands with due ceremony. The irony of their situation was highlighted by one student who pointed out that while their teachers always taunt them for talking to boys, sexual harassment on the campus continues unchecked and does not seem to bother anyone.

Emerging from these pressure cookers of patriarchal control that our universities and their hostels are proving to be in order to achieve a self-affirming existence is an obstacle race, as top-notch energy physicist Dr Swapna Mahapatra (‘A High Energy Physicist in Odisha Probes Into the Interrelated Universe’, March 7) well knows. She herself chose not to have children in order to keep up with her scholarship and expresses surprise as to why those in the emerging generation don’t seem to make such choices.

In her brilliant 1929 book, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf imagines what would have happened ‘If Shakespeare Had a Sister’, and goes on to say that “it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.” It seems similar for women in science in our day, because apart from leaving the stereotypes of patriarchal domesticity behind, they would also have to negotiate the huge negative stereotype that professor and supervisors as well as peers harbour: female students just don’t make the cut.

Journalism that makes visible the lives, work, and achievements of India’s women scientists deserves a special place in our mundane, black-and-white world of current affairs.

What makes a thinking journalist? Neelabh Mishra may have passed on, but his life and work provide an interesting template that privileges calm contemplation in the midst of the dizzying carousel of news creation. The piece, ‘Neelabh Mishra: A Discerning, Calm Voice Falls Silent in an Age of Simplistic Views and Noise’ (February 28) noted that history which makes one conscious of the continuity of time is the natural foil for journalism with its direct connect to the present. In a media world where self-projection is the norm, the capacity to voluntarily step away from the klieg lights and choose a medium and language less bristling with the accoutrements of power, is a valuable example that the late journalist offered those he left behind.

Source:https://thewire.in

It was an extraordinary recognition of unique role of the media in this country as the crucial bridge to the people of India. When four senior-most judges of the Supreme Court took the route of a press conference on January 12 to express their “great anguish and concern” about the state of affairs within an institution that was the country’s last court of appeal, it was also an acknowledgement that the media, in a way, is also a court of last appeal.

But will the Indian media rise up to this acknowledgement by taking on the challenge of a story that calls into question not just the functioning of the Supreme Court but the resilience of Indian democracy? The fact that it was met in the electronic media with the usual clamour, sometimes extraordinarily unhinged clamour, designed solely to disrupt and divert, is profoundly disappointing. But it shouldn’t surprise us because this is not a made-for-television story. It demands the quietude, careful documentation, archival memory and reasoned assumptions that the print media is naturally best placed to provide. If ever there was an argument to be made for the vital role that the print media plays in the ecology of India’s democratic media, it is this news break about these four dissenting judges.

Indian democracy, it seems, is too fragile a thing to be left to the echo chambers of television studios.

So how is this wake up call to be handled in the days ahead? The first thing the media should watch out for are efforts to upend the narrative, for these will surely come considering the very powerful actors who could feel threatened by this development. Fake news and calumny are already following in the wake of this story, and the days ahead will only bring more bilge.

Keeping the eye on the ball will require a refusal to be distracted by such noise and a close reading of the detailed letter that the four honourable judges have written. The media would do particularly well to critically examine recent judicial orders that have emerged from the Supreme Court over the past months and engage with ongoing hearings as well, because linked to this concern about the lack of transparency in the selection of judges to decide cases, and misgivings over the CJI’s roster management, are a raft of cases that will impact the future in many known and unknown ways.

With the story breaking, The Wire was quick with its capacity for compelling video (‘Watch: Understanding the Implications of the Historic Press Conference by Four Rebel Judges’ , January 12, 2018). There was an effort to catch up with the action in close to real time by generating both news reports and opinion. The writers of the article, ‘Black Day for Judiciary: Legal Fraternity Weighs in on Unprecedented Move by Four SC Judges’ (January 12), for instance, were able to garner a fair share of informed comment from the legal community. They could, however, have avoided referring to one of their interviewees, Aman Lekhi, as being “known for his proximity to the ruling BJP”, since they had not specifically mentioned the political leanings of the others they had spoken to. Perhaps just mentioning that Lekhi was married to BJP MP and spokesperson, Meenakshi Lekhi, would have sufficed. Also the heading did not do justice to the piece. In fact, Kamini Jaiswal, from whose quote the headline was taken, had after expressing distress about the turn of events, had gone on to say that because the judges had spoken out, “at least now the people know what is happening”. Far from being a “black day”, I would say it was the reverse – some sunshine has finally been finally let into the dark chambers of the court.

Where The Wire appears to have done a more comprehensive job than most news media is in tackling what one commentator referred to as the “the elephant in the room – the Judge B.H. Loya case” (‘An Honourable Disagreement Within India’s Highest Court’, January 13). The case is important, he argued, because it “goes to the very core of the judiciary’s role in ensuring that we remain a country governed by the rule of law. When a judge looking into an extremely sensitive case dies in mysterious circumstances, every single judicial functionary is left to draw his/her fearful conclusions.” Ironically, many in the mainstream media appear too fearful to draw any conclusion, and the death of Judge Loya continues to be ignored by mainstream media – apart from some attempts to discredit reportage on it.

In such a scenario, it falls on a platform like The Wire to take a more holistic view of the whole issue. Apart from decent update of the case (‘Death of a Judge: What We Know, What We Don’t Know’, January 12), it also carried a timeline on the almost deliberately forgotten Sohrabuddin elimination, on which Justice Loya was to pronounce before his untimely death (‘Sohrabuddin Fake Encounter Case: A Timeline of Events’, January 12). There was also an important interview with one of the editors of The Caravan, the magazine that had broken the story on Justice Loya’s death (‘Watch: What Does the SC Judges’ Statement Mean for the Judge Loya Case?’), and who pulled no punches in accusing every institution, from the police to the media, for having failed this case.

All this recalls the words of another Supreme Court judge, H.R. Khanna, who too was tested in another era for daring to deliver a dissenting judgment on a politically fraught case – Additional District Magistrate of Jabalpur vs Shiv Kant Shukla – by being superseded for the post of chief justice of the Supreme Court. In his book, Making of India’s Constitution, Justice Khanna wrote, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty and in the final analysis, its only keepers are the people. Imbecility of men, history teaches us, always invites the impudence of power.”

If the media is to perform its function as the main instrument for that eternal vigilance of the people, it will have to call out the “impudence of power” – and this story about four judges and a press conference is nothing if it is not about the impudence of power and the need to expose it.

Source: Thewire.in