Shireen Dalvi: Urdu-English press divide
Between the reaction of Urdu journalists to the Shireen Dalvi controversy and the reaction of the English press lies a huge gulf.
JYOTI PUNWANI reports
HERE’S LOOKING AT US
Jyoti Punwani
Is there no way the chasm between the English and the Urdu press can be bridged? The question is prompted by the surge of despair I felt at a press conference called by the 'Mumbai Awadhnama Patrakar Sangharsh Samiti' earlier this month in Mumbai.
The Mumbai edition of the Lucknow-based daily Awadhnama has been in the news after its editor, Shireen Dalvi, published a Charlie Hebdo cover depicting the Prophet alongside an article in her paper on January 17. Informed that the religious feelings of some readers had been offended, Dalvi tendered a front page apology the very next day, and went into hiding, afraid of the consequences of the spectre of religious fury against her created by sections of the Urdu press.
On January 19, the Mumbai edition was closed down by its owners. Five FIRs were filed across the city and state against Dalvi for publishing the cover, under Section 295 A relating to outraging religious feelings with malicious intent.
Dalvi is out on bail, but remains in hiding.
The press conference was called to 'expose the truth' behind the events leading to Awadhnama’s closure, and had a two-fold message: One, the speakers felt aggrieved that even though they had resorted to legal means to address their grievance, the English press was condemning them and making Dalvi out to be a victim.
Two, the real victims were Awadhnama’s employees who had been rendered jobless by the closure. This closure was allegedly a management ruse to avoid paying the dues owed to its employees since the paper was launched early in 2014 and Dalvi was allegedly part of this conspiracy and therefore not at all the victim.
On both counts, those who spoke at the press conference failed to convince the English journalists present. Every statement made by the four speakers only served to expose their lack of credibility. What made it worse was the near-silence of the Urdu journalists present.
The proceedings of the press conference need to be described in detail to show how difficult it is to bridge the gulf between the mindsets of the English and Urdu press which bodes ill for both, and for society.
The first speaker was Nehal Sagheer, a former sub-editor of the paper who was quoted in the initial reports of the episode in the Urdu press as having warned Dalvi against publishing the Charlie Hebdo cover. But, he was quoted as saying, she had dismissed his warning with the words: "We should be broadminded. What’s the worst that can happen – at the most, a few hundred copies of the paper will be burnt."
Coming in the wake of the Paris killings, this quote ascribed to her damaged her irretrievably in the eyes of her community which constitutes the readers of the Urdu press. It cast her in the Charlie Hebdo "free speech at any cost" mould and, as a Muslim, she appeared even more culpable.
Sagheer was later found to be lying. He had been sacked on January 15 and wasn’t even in the office when the January 17 issue of the paper was being prepared. However, two days before the press conference, he had boasted that the
person who had in fact warned Dalvi would be presented there. At the press conference too, it was claimed that Dalvi had been advised not to go ahead with the Charlie Hebdo cover. But the speakers could not present anyone who had indeed done so. This strengthened Dalvi’s version that nobody had given her any such advice.
This claim (of Dalvi having been advised not to publish the cover) was meant to be the trump card to prove that Dalvi had acted with deliberate intent. It turned out to be hollow, but the speakers nonetheless continued their allegations against her.
The person who spoke longest was the editor of the Sahafat daily, Saeed Hamid, who had joined Awadhnama soon after its launch but left soon afterwards. He had his own conspiracy theory, namely, that the cover was aimed at creating tension between Muslims and the police in Mumbai before US President Obama’s Republic Day visit.
To back up this fantastic claim, Hamid cited two other examples: a mini-riot that had broken out on Eid Milad and been swiftly controlled and a report in the Mumbai Mirror about a Mumbra youth being forced to join ISIS by some maulanas. The report was based on an FIR filed by the youth’s parents and an interview with them. But Mumbra residents had described the report as false and taken out protest marches against the Mumbai Mirror. (The paper’s office has since been provided security.)
According to Hamid, the Mumbai Mirror was part of this conspiracy too. Incidentally, the Mumbai Mirror report was published after Obama had left the country.
Hamid claimed that the cartoon on the Charlie Hebdo cover had provoked Muslims across the city, and only assurances by the ulema and Urdu journalists that they would go to the police against her had prevented them from taking to the streets. The English press, he said, should have been appreciative of the role played by the Urdu press instead of slamming it.
When asked why no report of any such tension had appeared in the English press, Hamid accused English journalists of being ignorant of the ground situation in Muslim areas.
However, mohalla committee members who are always the first to get wind of such tension told me that most Muslims didn’t even know about the Awadhnama cover until it was reported in the Urdu press the next day. After all, as Hamid himself said, the circulation of Awadhnama was barely a thousand.
Ironically, having claimed to have played a major role in calming religious passions, Hamid had a banner headline in his paper Sahafat the next day, screaming that the city was on high alert due to the publishing of the Charlie Hebdo cover by Awadhnama.
This isn’t the first time Hamid has sensationalized sensitive issues. In 2001, when Atal Behari Vajpayee was prime minister and copies of the Koran were burnt in Delhi by Bajrang Dal members, Urdu papers across the country blanked out the news so as not to inflame passions. But Hamid, then with the Urdu Times, carried a photograph of the act on page one. He later justified this action in an interview to me by saying that his paper catered to Muslims and he had to publish news important to his community.
The two other speakers at the press conference were convenors of the 'Forum Against Blasphemy'. One of them, Zubair Azmi, who was the first to have filed a police complaint against Dalvi, made the shocking claim that any insult to the Prophet Mohammed was like "pressing the button on a nuclear arsenal".
Complaining about the English press’ coverage, Azmi said that the community was always portrayed as violent and fanatical. "Had someone slapped Dalvi, had I gone up to Dalvi and dragged her by the hair, you (the English press) would have made it front page news. But when we show restraint and adopt legal means as you have always advised us to, you accuse us of hounding her."
The other 'Forum Against Blasphemy spokesman, Farid Khan, started off by saying that he was shocked that a "lady Urdu editor" had done something which was forbidden in Islam. But in the very next breath he added: "I am not surprised because I am familiar with her work in the past." He however, did not elaborate on this.
As if these utterances weren’t enough, the speakers mocked Dalvi’s claims to being the first woman editor of an Urdu newspaper, with Saeed Hamid reeling out the names of female Urdu journalists. "The Urdu press is full of women," he claimed. But were any of them an editor of a news daily? "What will women do by being editors?" he retorted.
After the speakers had finished, questions from the English journalists followed. Didn’t Islam teach forgiveness? Since Dalvi had apologized, shouldn’t she be forgiven?
Given the havoc created by Pakistan’s blasphemy law against the country’s minorities, did the Forum Against Blasphemy want a similar law in India? The answer was ‘yes’.
The Shiv Sena newspaper Saamna had also published a sketch of the Prophet some years ago. Why hadn’t the speakers, or anyone from the community, gone to the police then? Why had they sought to resolve the issue diplomatically ? Saamna had not apologized. What then happened to the "button on the nuclear arsenal"?
The confrontation made one cringe. What were the organisers thinking when they held this press conference? Had they really thought they would be able to convince the English press of their belief that Shireen Dalvi was in the villain, not the victim? When so many Muslim intellectuals and activists in Mumbai, among them the secretary of the Urdu Patrakar Sangh and the editor of Hindustan Urdu daily, Sarfaraz Arzoo, maintained that Dalvi had committed no crime, how did they expect other journalists to regard her as guilty?
The speakers ignored two important aspects of the entire episode. One is that Dalvi is a journalist and it is rare for journalists to badmouth their fellow professionals on record. As Arzoo commented wryly, "This must be the first time an editor has held a press conference against another editor."
The speakers went to great lengths to clarify that they had done nothing to send Dalvi into hiding; she had done so to evade arrest. But from the very beginning, most of the Urdu press has gone full steam against Dalvi, carrying opinions of the ulema saying her "crime" is punishable by death, comparing her to Taslima Nasreen and alleging that she is being used by the RSS. Two days after the press conference, Sahafat and Urdu Times carried an opinion piece on Dalvi which said that she knew nothing of Islam and had "sold her conscience".
The second aspect ignored by the organisers was that journalists cannot be expected to view events from a religious lens. Even if a journalist felt that blasphemy was an "unforgiveable crime, which deserves beheading under Islamic law" (in the graphic words of journalist Izhar Ahmed, president of the Urdu Patrakar Sangh) this personal belief cannot influence a journalist’s writing.
But this separation from one’s religious beliefs and one’s profession was nowhere to be seen in the reportage of the issue. Indeed, when questioned about his statement, Izhar Ahmed, declared: "I am a Muslim first, then a journalist." Incidentally, after Sarfaraz Arzoo, Secretary of the Sangh, made it clear that Ahmed’s views did not reflect those of the Sangh, Ahmed admitted that he had not spoken in his official capacity, but "as a Muslim." However, he was quick to add: "Journalism which violates my religious laws is not worth it."
This mindset perhaps explains why most of the Urdu journalists did not ask any questions at the press conference, and why some of them grumbled later that the (Muslim) reporter of the Times of India had turned the press conference on its head by asking the "wrong" questions.
Urdu journalists often justify such religiously-coloured reporting by saying that they owe it to their readers. But should a newspaper pander to their readers’ religious feelings? This brings to mind the defence given by the head of the Sandesh newspaper to the Editors’ Guild team which questioned him on his paper’s biased and inflammatory reporting of the 2002 Gujarat violence.
"Hindu protection is my duty," Falgun Patel replied. Another example of such journalism was seen after the Babri Masjid was first attacked in 1990. The Press Council had then censured four Hindi newspapers (Aaj, Dainik Jagran, Swatantra Chetna and Swatantra Bharat) for their exaggerated reports of the firing that took place then.
It was obvious after the press conference how it would be reported the next day by the English press and the Urdu press. Muslims who rely only on the Urdu press would have got to read that Shireen Dalvi was part of nefarious conspiracies aimed at harming her colleagues and her community.
Readers of the English press would have got a completely different view. It wouldn’t have been the first time this happened either. The gap between a large section of Muslims and the rest of the society they live in has only got wider.
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