A media heroine discovers pitfalls of media hype
If you have a horror of effusions then it is probably wise not to scan the 12,000-odd collage of postings that a Google search throws up when you type the words ‘Nisha Sharma.’ For the most part, the postings, stretching from sea to shining sea, reflect the current orgy of adoration that the media has lavished on a pint-sized 21 year-old with flashing brown eyes called Nisha Sharma. Last May with her arranged wedding to Manish Dalal only minutes away Sharma dared to call the police to complain against her prospective in laws for demanding dowry.
By doing the Right Thing the young woman of not so modest means has become an instant celebrity. In the days that followed, says Sharma, speaking from her house in Sector 56 in Noida, she was interviewed, grilled stalked, interrogated by an army of media persons. How many interviews was she subjected to… twenty? "No, no much more," she responds. Fifty? "No at least a hundred," she says firmly, ticking off the sessions she can remember on her fingers. "CNN, BBC, CBS, Canadian Broadcasting, NBC, ABC, French television, NDTV, Sahara Samay, Aaj Tak, Zee, ETV, DD, New York Times, Guardian, AP, Times of India, Indian Express, Hindustan Times …". She drones on practically going down the whole alphabet. There are definite signs of media fatigue.
Even though two months have passed after the fatal telephone call to the police there is no end to the hyperbole and the media deluge. Willy nilly Nisha Sharma has become a media sensation. And why not? Her story is a good gig. It’s an endearing mosaic of a young, defenseless girl defying tradition, a social dissident fighting off a groom’s greed. Besides it has the potential of a happy after ending.
The kind of boost Sharma received could be seen from the headlines. ‘It Takes Guts to Send your Groom Packing,’ lead The Times of India; ‘Dowry Busting Bride Wins Star Status,’ said CNN.com; ‘Moment of Daring,’ gushed The Week; ‘Youth Icon Takes up Women’s Cause’ was rediff.com’s angle. and ‘Bravo! We are Proud of You’, front-paged Rashritya Sahara. When the news channel Aaj Tak broke the story 1,500 messages of congratulations and support clogged its message ticker for days.
For the international press, the event was a perfect magnet. It showed how narrowly Sharma missed being one of the 7,000-odd women who had died from dowry related deaths in 2001. The story fitted into the international mindset that in India baby girls were routinely bumped off at or before birth and even if they did survive there were burnt to death for bringing inadequate dowry or condemned to life of servitude. Supporting this theory, a report on a news website, ambitious.org, said: "The death of an ox is a misfortune but the death of a girl is a piece of good luck.’ The quote was apparently a "classic Hindu saying."
According to a press release issued by the BBC when their on-line news service carried the Sharma story they received 170, 000 email responses in two days. A 23 year-old resident of Kabul even proposed marriage. Widely acclaimed American correspondent, Christiane Amanpour swooped into Delhi this June spent a day interviewing Sharma for CBS’s 60 Minutes. (See Box.)
The saturation coverage fuelled by the myth making abilities of the media couldn’t but be sympathetic to Nisha Sharma. The fact that her father, Dev Dutt Sharma, who runs a machine manufacturing factory and mother, Hemlata Sharma, were also culpable under the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1962 for ‘giving’ dowry initially even though they said they were gifts for their daughter -- remember the photographs of the two TVs, two fridges and flashy car --- was brushed aside by the most skilled and incisive practioners of journalism. As they say the devil is in the details.
The truth was that only when the demand went above the danger level, in this case Rs 12 million, did Sharma and her family react. A few reports did give a more rational, and hence contrarion view, like Kalpana Sharma’s column in The Hindu and a report by Shailaja Neelakanthan in Asia Times Online. But generally media outlets glorified the Nisha Sharma legend which took a life force of its own.
Now Sharma has become the toast of film stars. Politicians drop in for tea. She is a secretary of the Antiterrorist Front, women’s organisations fete her and political parties woo her. A comic strip is going to be started in her name and a Hollywood director is planning a film being made on her life. The undergrad has become the Indian version of Xena the Warrior Princess on a quest to vanquish all dowry seekers.
Only she is not. Currently and perhaps even more so before 5/11 Nisha is as unassuming as the monsoon rain dripping out side her house. At heart this third year software engineering student of Guru Gobind Ram Indraprastha College, despite the reams of column cms, is almost objectionably conservative and traditional. Outside her home she only wears salwar kameez with long sleeves " to prevent tanning". Smoking or drinking are moral abominations; she has never seen a movie in a theatre hall, she’s not impressed by children who call their fathers ‘dad’; thinks that all newly wed women should cover their heads and is unbelievably shocked that there exist Indian women who want to boycott marriage. And she is getting ready to enter another arranged marriage.
The media in choosing to cover her the way it did not only gave her the power of publicity, but it also given her an onerous responsibility of being almost an invincible, fire spewing feminist. What began as an attempt to thwart her future in-laws, has morphed into a something more burdensome. Sharma is still righteous and proud about what she did but the onus that the media has placed on her is a little unnerving. No wonder she is a little bewildered.
Even though nine girls have refused to get married because of dowry demands in June alone Sharma she doesn’t see herself as a an agent of social change " Most of what I have seen and read about myself has made me into something really powerful, a liberator." The media by not introducing these apprehensions glossed over reality. By choosing to inform the public about the events of May 11 in a particular way they packaged Nisha in a way they wanted to see her and the way they thought would go down well for icon starved public.
The cynical can call Nisha media hungry and point to the twenty dailies that the Sharma family currently subscribes to---a jump from the one Hindi newspaper that has been serving this family for the past many decades. But despite the excessive coverage, Sharma says, she has not seen the clippings her father keeps and neither does she track the TV coverage. "If somebody calls me and tells me that I am appearing in a programme I will watch it but I am not on the look out. The one I saw and really liked was TV anchor Nalini Singh’s programme on Sony. It neither lifted me up or did me down. It was very balanced. "
In fact ‘balance’ is what Sharma is desperately looking for these days from the media. She is a little taken aback that the moonstruck media which a week ago was deifying her is making her into a demon, thanks to an unverified statement made by former college friend, Navneet Rai that she had married him secretly earlier this year. Pointing to a report in The Pioneer headlined ‘Nisha Married Me in February ’ she says bitterly: " The least they could have done was to check with me. " Superwoman is slowly realizing how double-edged the media can be.
Sharma’s action has undoubtedly rescued the issue of dowry from oblivion. As Ranjana Kumari, director, Centre of Social Research, says: " People may have doubts about what Nisha did and why she did it but the point is that by giving her publicity the media raised consciousness about dowry which hasn’t happened in a long time." But this fallout brings little comfort to Sharma who is fuming over the coverage given by papers and news channels to Rai’s version. "I am going to send these papers a legal notice. Why are they destroying my character? May be they have been bought off. " For the media perhaps it’s a wrong ending to the Nisha story.
| Two Stories For the Price Of One
When Christiane Amanpour came a calling… Take one, good-looking, 21 year-old girl from Middle India; blend with a measure of family fury and add a dash of daring. Mix briskly to prevent lumping and what do you have? A perfect recipe for a lead story. Arguably, the Nisha Sharma’s story has the perfect ingredients to attract even the attention of television journalism’s super star Christiane Amanpour. For four days the correspondent hop scotched from Delhi, Punjab Haryana to Mumbai before she flew off to Jordan to cover an economic summit. Technically Amanpour is CNN’s chief international correspondent based in London but she also contributes ‘’five or six stories " to CBS channel annually. And so it was that Amanpour zoomed into Delhi last month to interview Nisha Sharma and show case the malpractice of dowry in India on CBS’s 60 Minutes. Both Sharma and Ranjana Kumari from Delhi’s Centre for Social Research were interviewed extensively for the programme. "She was so well informed," says Kumari. Sharma adds that, "Unlike Indian journalists who are always looking to trip you up reporters like Amanpour take everything at face value. And she is so beautiful." "Beautiful" she may be but Amanpour’s information base was largely the result of a team of six researchers and producers who came to India two weeks before she did to prepare the groundwork. It was this team that unearthed data, scouted for locales, tapped interesting angles, put together clippings for Amanpour to digest before she got her face made up and fringe put into place in readiness for the camera to roll. It was the researchers who zeroed onto a family in Etawah who had lost their daughter in a dowry related death and were hell bent on putting their former relations into jail. It was the team that booked an entire restaurant in Noida, Kebab-e- Kebab, a favourite haunt for college girls for a ‘possible‘ shoot. The Kodak moment occurred when a group of ‘hep’ girls entered the eatery. Sharma was primed to ask them whether they would go in for an ‘arranged’ or a ‘love’ marriage. Sharma was shocked at approaching this gaggle of girls who was smoking, drinking and dressed in hip-hugging jeans. Despite their apparent westernization, the girls said they would all opt for "an arranged" match—with dowry if need be. The American TV crew was pleased. Arranged marriage + dowry = blueprint for oppression. In Delhi, Amanpour’s ‘field’ work was interspersed with socializing. Kumari had organized a dinner at India International Centre to felicitate the reporter. The guests were a motley crowd of women activists, journalists and bureaucrats. Favouring a brown linen suit, jangling earrings and a weird sense of time chief guest Amanpour arrived an hour-and-a-half late. Without apologising for her tardiness she efficiently showed herself to be an empowered feminist, supporter of affirmative action and a critic of the Iraq war while going through butter chicken and rasmalai. Sharma was only part one of Amanpour’s agenda in India. Part Two was a report on gender imbalance in India and to that end she went for a day’s visit to Haryana and Punjab where the statistics "are just too, too horrible to talk about". But talk she will. Unfortunately not about professional Indian women who have climbed and are climbing the ladder of achievement but of baby girls who have either been killed before being born or suffocated as infants. After all the worse it is, the better it is for journalists. |
—MC
Mannika Chopra writes a TV column for The Statesman and is a media analyst. She can be contacted at <hootlog2003@yahoo.co.in>
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