In the old days, journalists were prevented from referring to communities while reporting any acts of
violence. At some level, this made a certain amount of sense. If a man picked your pocket then it shouldn’t really matter whether he was a Sikh, a Jain, a
Muslim or whatever. All that mattered was that he was a pickpocket.
But the real reason for the restraint had to do with the fear of provoking communal violence. If you reported that a Muslim had raped a Hindu woman then there was some danger of communally inspired reprisals. In today’s Mumbai, for instance, nothing is gained by reporting that Maharashtrians were robbed by UP-ites; and something might well be lost.
Often, this restraint went too far. Readers began to giggle when every Hindu-Muslim riot was described as ‘a clash between two communities.’ And often, you didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what had really happened. For instance, if a report read “some miscreants threw raw pork into a place of worship,” it was quite obvious that a mosque had been desecrated.
Nevertheless, I still believe that we should not worry about people’s religion or ethnic origin unless it is vital to the story. For instance, nobody in the US would report something like “four black men were today arrested for mugging an old white woman.” This would be needlessly inflammatory.
I was reminded of the need for restraint when I saw the way the media – TV mainly, but print also – covered the case of the allegedly demented IIT graduate who killed a girl.
If the police are to be believed – and the media certainly believed the police – then the murderer had not only confessed but had been revealed to be a psychopath who had stalked the girl because of his own inadequacies.
Nowhere in the reporting did I find any evidence that the psycho in question had been fascinated by people from the north east or had targeted his victim because of her ethnic origin: she was a Naga from Manipur.
And yet, judging by the reportage, the murder was one more instance of how girls from the north east were treated badly in Delhi. Channel after channel had the same foolish discussion about the problems faced by people from the north east and about how they faced discrimination in the Capital.
"How else do you explain why we treat the murder of a Naga differently from the murder of a Muslim or a Sikh?"
|
I do not dispute that girls from the north east find it difficult to gain acceptance in the Indian mainstream. Nor do I dispute that there is a certain amount of racism implicit in the way that they are treated.
My point is this: this murder had nothing to do with racism or with the prejudice against north easterners.
So why treat the victim’s ethnicity as being the primary component of the story? Why stage all these discussions on north easterners in Delhi when this story had nothing to do with discrimination?
To understand how bizarre this kind of news treatment is, consider what would have happened if the victim had been a Muslim girl. Would we have run stories talking about the discrimination faced by Muslims? Would we have treated the murder as one more example of the mistreatment of Muslims by Hindus?
Of course not.
So why do we treat people from the north east so differently?
Part of it is laziness. Journos know that this is an easy discussion to organize so they go ahead and stage one regardless of the relevance to the story.
But part of it is also racism.
How else do you explain why we treat the murder of a Naga differently from the murder of a Muslim or a Sikh?
Name:
E-mail:
Your email id will not be published.
Friend's Name:
Friend's E-mail:
Your email id will not be published.
Additional Text:
Security code:
Other Articles
-
It is not only the right thing to do on an intuitive level but also entirely in accordance with the principles on which this nation was founded.
-
My point is that in a country as large as ours, a numbers game makes no sense unless you look at the larger picture.
-
It is tempting to see the revolt as a failure because Pawar got nothing of consequence in Delhi. But it would be a mistake to do so.
-
This was an unnecessary reshuffle, forced on the nation by Manmohan Singh’s unwillingness to hold on to the finance portfolio.
-
And the end has an emotional power that is unusual for comic book pictures. What a pity it is the last movie in this trilogy!
See All