Nov. 26: What the print media missed out

IN Media Practice | 22/01/2009

SECOND TAKE

Kalpana Sharma

Almost two months after the November 26, 2008 terror attack on Mumbai, the rantings against the media in general, and the electronic media in particular, have virtually subsided.  The government too has sensibly pulled back on its plan to impose a form of pre-censorship on the electronic media, something that all members of the media have opposed.  Government control can never be the solution to lack of responsibility by the media on any issue.  That much, one hopes, has finally been acknowledged and settled.

But the weeks since the attack have shown up some other issues that should concern us in the media and that need to be addressed.

For instance, in the aftermath of the 2006 train bombings in Mumbai, most newspapers had follow up stories on the people who had been killed, the good Samaritans who came forward to help, the role played by doctors and others at the hospitals to tend to the wounded and the reports of eye-witnesses describing what happened.

After the November attacks, some of this did happen in the initial couple of weeks.  But since then, most of the writing has either been about the confessions of the lone terrorist who was caught, the future of Indo-Pak relations, the threats and counter-threats from both sides, and what needs to be done to better equip the police.

In 2006, the Indian Express followed up each and every one of the 187 people killed and ran stories about them and their families.  Later, these stories were put together in a book.  This time round, barring The Hindu, which does not have a Mumbai edition, none of the local newspapers have done this kind of detailed follow-up.  The Times of India published a full list of those who had been killed in the terror attack at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, a list that was released by the Central Railways.  Yet no one has followed up on these 58 individuals except journalists from The Hindu.

Most Mumbai newspapers have carried stories about the policemen killed. But why not of the civilians?

A full list of those killed in all the four locations has not been published.  The dossier, prepared by the government and handed over to diplomats from the countries whose citizens died, and sent to Pakistan, has a list of the 26 foreign nationals who died.  It mentions that a total of 165 people were killed and 304 injured. But where is the list of the Indians who died?

The two hotels at the centre of the attack, the Taj and the Trident, have apparently refused to let journalists get a list of the members of their staff who were either killed or injured or of the residents of the hotels who died or were injured.  This kind of secrecy is inexplicable unless the families of the staff or the guests have expressly asked that their names not be made public.  If that were the case, the hotels should say so rather than obfuscating. As a result, although some stories have appeared about a couple of prominent businessmen and the journalist Sabina Sehgal Saikia, there is little information about the others who died in these two locations.

It is also a mystery why we know little or nothing about the other three, or is it four, people who were killed at Nariman House.  There have been several stories about the Rabbi and his wife who were killed, as well as of their little son Moshe who survived.  But nothing is known of the other people killed.

As a result, this is the first time after such an attack that people do not have full details about all the people killed and injured, how many of the latter have recovered, how many have received compensation etc.  Such stories were routine on previous occasions.

Another striking aspect of the coverage is the lack of curiosity by the media to reconstruct what exactly happened that night.  The official version, as presented by Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram, sets out one scenario.  But is all of it true?  Some discrepancies have been exposed by the personal investigation conducted by Vinita Kamte, wife of the senior police official Ashok Kamte who was shot down along with the head of the Anti Terror Squad, Hemant Karkare and Vijay Salaskar near Cama Hospital. So could there be other discrepancies?  How is it that no newspaper has bothered to send its reporters to simply reconstruct what happened that night, figure out how long it takes to travel by taxi from the point the terrorists landed at the fishing colony in Colaba to the other locations where they attacked and ascertain whether this matches with the official version? Why do we hesitate to do this kind of investigation?  Is it because in matters of terror, we are too afraid of challenging official wisdom for fear of being called "anti-national"?

There are several other leads that the media has either suppressed, through a kind of self-censorship, or has not considered pursuing.  The Mumbai Mirror carried a disturbing front-page photograph on December 25, a day short of one month after the attack, with a pixilated image of two bodies inside a room.  The story claimed that the terrorists had forced some of the foreigners to undress before shooting them and that the police had photographic evidence of this.  The paper also claimed that it had seen all these photographs but had refrained from publishing them.  Why then did it publish this one?  Was it another effort to be sensational, or to show that it had better contacts in the police than anyone else, or was this a hoax?  The story disappeared without any follow up, without any explanation.  And no other newspaper took it up either.  So the mystery remains.

The tendency of the media to rely entirely on police reports without conducting its own investigation was shown up rather dramatically on the question of how Karkare, Kamte and Salaskar were killed on their way from Cama Hospital.  In the early versions, there was no explanation given about why these three senior officials got into one vehicle and how they drove directly into an ambush by the terrorists. Why did they get no warning?  Did they not even fire back?  The official version contained no details and seemed to suggest that they were caught off guard by the terrorists who shot the three officers, threw their bodies out of the vehicle and drove off in it towards the Oberoi.

It took Vinita Kamte to spend a month conducting her own investigation to reconstruct what happened that night.  And it is she who has been able to establish that her husband in fact did fire at Kasab, the surviving terrorist, and injured him before being shot down and that this information was available with the police.  She was also able to confirm that he fired at the terrorists at Cama who then apparently fled from the hospital into the lane behind it.  She has also found that although the police control room had information that the two terrorists had left Cama, that information was not relayed to the three senior officers who were working out strategy outside the hospital¿s back gate.  Could the media not have found some of this out?

The focus on the media¿s misdeeds in the coverage of the November 26 attack has centered on the electronic media.  But the print media is not entirely exempt.  In the past, if newspapers have done detailed follow up stories, it is because their editors thought this was a worthwhile exercise and also something that the media needed to do.  People killed in such attacks should not remain anonymous, without names or faces.  It is the job of the media to bring out the human dimension of such tragedies.  So the question we must ask is why, barring one newspaper, have the rest thought that this time such stories need not be done.