Blaming the messenger: Media under pressure in Kashmir

IN Media Freedom | 16/11/2010

Since June this year, the Kashmir valley has been torn by mass protests which have been met with overwhelming force by Indian security forces. Curfews and closures have been frequent, often shading into each other.

No less than 111 deaths have been registered, of which a large number havebeen of students and youth in the age group of 8 to 25 years. There have besides, been hundreds of cases of injuries, of both protesters and those who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

An independent fact-finding team went to the Kashmir valley at the end of October to go into the totality of the situation, principally to inquire into the causes for the unconscionably large number of deaths that have occurred in the current phase of mass agitation. The team comprised of academic Bela Bhatia, advocate Vrinda Grover, journalist and representative of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) Sukumar Muralidharan and activist Ravi Hemadri of The Other Media, a Delhi based campaign and advocacy organisation, at whose initiative the effort was organised.

Roughly about twenty-five person days were put in the fact-finding exercise. In groups or individually, the team met the families of almost 40 persons who had been killed since the beginning of the civil unrest. Several individuals who had suffered serious injuries were also met. The team worked out of the state capital of Srinagar, and visited villages and towns in five of the Kashmir valley’s ten districts: Baramulla in the north (Sopore and Baramulla tehsils); Anantnag (Bijbehara and Anantnag tehsils) and Pulwama (Pulwama tehsil) in the south; Badgam in the west (Chadura and Badgam tehsils) and Srinagar itself.

Separate sessions were held with journalists and media practitioners, university teachers and students, doctors, lawyers and activists besides officials in the police headquarters and the civil administration.

Excerpts from the report’s situation report on the media

Introduction

Since large-scale civil unrest began in the Kashmir valley ??" the largest of the three regions of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir ??" in June this year, the difficulties faced by journalists have rapidly escalated. Along with an easing in overall levels of violence, overt threats faced by journalists have probably declined since September 2010, but restraints on the media’s daily functioning continue. Newspapers have been closed for an estimated total of 30 days since protests intensified in Kashmir in mid-June 2010, with local journalists confined to their homes and others assaulted.

Government advertising is allocated quite transparently to media that are complaint to the official diktat, while news gathering in Kashmir is impeded by restrictions on movement and disrupted communications. Text messaging (SMS) through the state’s mobile telephone network was suspended in June, and television news broadcasts have been heavily restricted. Internet connectivity is frequently disrupted and those posting to social networking sites are subject to scrutiny and in some cases arrest.

To combat these threats, journalists in Kashmir have organised via their two main platforms ??" the Kashmir Press Guild and the Kashmir Press Association. Important gestures of solidarity have come from collectives in other parts of India, such as the Delhi Union of Journalists (DUJ). The Editors’ Guild of India and the Press Club of India have also joined in the effort to ensure Kashmir’s journalists a better deal in a time of unabated turmoil.

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Junctures of civil unrest in Kashmir invariably call forth an official attitude of blaming the messenger, which results in various forms of restraint on the region’s journalists, often stretching to active measures of repression that are regarded by authorities as a perfectly permissible stratagem for restoring order.

Since the upsurge in civil unrest in the Kashmir valley in June 2010, media practitioners claim that their situation, in terms of daily work routines, has deteriorated sharply. Accessing news sites has become an ordeal and gaining authentic information on the disturbances that break out with alarming regularity, virtually impossible.

Newspapers have been shut for about 30 days in total since Kashmir’s protests began to intensify from mid-June. The travails for journalists became particularly grim from about July 7 when, after several years, the Indian army was summoned out of its barracks and deployed on the streets of Kashmir, curfew restrictions were extended to cover the movement of all civilians and an announcement made by the state’s Home Department, that press passes would no longer be honoured.

Kashmir’s media personnel were confined to their homes for several days following these actions. Photographers and news cameramen in Srinagar were assaulted that day as they sought to record the army deployment and other major events. Some had their professional equipment confiscated by security agencies.

These incidents followed similar occurrences a day earlier, when at least 12 photographers working for local, national and international media organisations were assaulted in Srinagar and suffered injuries of various degrees of seriousness. As the camera operators were attacked, senior police were heard remarking that without media attention the demonstrations would soon lose momentum.

On July 2, authorities in the region of Jammu sealed the premises of three publications on the grounds that they had allegedly carried false and misleading news reports that tended to aggravate tensions between religious communities. The following day, copies of Greater Kashmir and Kashmir Uzma, the leading newspapers in English and Urdu in the Kashmir valley, were seized as they were being readied for distribution.

A few days into these closures, the Kashmir Press Guild, a platform of the most senior journalists in the region, issued a statement deprecating the situation in which local journalists were confined to their homes by an unrelenting curfew, while media personnel flying in from Delhi were afforded armed protection and given considerable freedom of movement.

In the perception of the Guild, it was as if the story of Kashmir, if it were to be told at all, could only be entrusted to the narrative skills of journalists enjoying the stamp of approval that comes from working in the national capital. 

On July 9, when curfew and closures were at their most oppressive in the Kashmir valley, the state government seemed to relent marginally after virtually locking all journalists in for days. Journalists in Srinagar were given a telephonic assurance that they would be provided fresh curfew passes to replace the ones invalidated after the army deployment of July 7.

As senior journalist Riyaz Masroor set off from his home in the Alucha Bagh neighbourhood of Srinagar, to collect the fresh issue of his curfew pass, he was stopped at a police checkpoint and attacked with batons and forced to return home, with serious injuries to his hip and right wrist.

On October 1, Merajuddin and Umar Meraj of the Associated Press TV news service, and Mufti Islah and Shakeel-ur Rahman of the Indian news channel CNN-IBN, were assaulted by security forces while on their way to the state legislative assembly in Srinagar.

Through 15 days in September, few newspapers were printed in Srinagar because journalists and print workers could not reach their places of work. Among the few newspapers that were published, most found distribution channels blocked, as delivery vehicles were detained at the Mirgund and Kotibagh checkpoints just outside Srinagar.

On September 30, all copies of Greater Kashmir, Rising Kashmir, Kashmir Uzma and Buland Kashmir were seized from their points of production in Srinagar city and taken to local police stations. The following day, the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, informed the state assembly that he had not issued any order for the seizure of the newspapers, though the police were empowered to examine media content prior to publication.

Advertising Allocations Questioned

Journalists in Srinagar hesitate to use the term "discrimination", but they have reason to believe that an increasing degree of arbitrariness has crept into the allocation of government advertising budgets among newspapers. The evidence available today, of selective allocations to newspapers that are seen to be amenable and severe cutbacks to those that are seen to be too independent, comes on the heels of longstanding grievances that government advertising budgets overwhelmingly favour newspapers in Jammu rather than Srinagar.

Even this relatively meagre allocation for the print media in their city is now distributed with intent to ensure compliance with the official diktat. Journalists from three leading newspapers published from Srinagar ??" Rising Kashmir, Greater Kashmir and Kashmir Uzma ??" believe that they have been unfairly deprived of advertising. As a result, they have had to enforce stringent curbs on staff salaries and in some cases, even limited retrenchments.

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