Dateline North-East: Risky Business

Dateline North-East: Risky Business

To fully appreciate the conditions in which the media functions in the North-East, some standard terms have to be redefined.

To fully appreciate the conditions in which the media functions in the North-East, some standard terms have to be redefined. Here is a glossary of some phrases journalists usually use in other contexts.

Going out on an assignment: Being blindfolded and taken to an underground militant`s group hideout. If it`s the HQ deep in the hills, this could mean an overnight trip.

Unionism: Pressure on managements to have a proper structure, to define who is a reporter, sub-editor, newseditor etc. To hand out appointment letters instead of expecting everyone to work on the basis of an informal understanding. No union gets to the point where it could ask for a raise.

Workplace: A room in somebody else`s home. Where, women journalists says jokingly, you could complain of harassment under the new laws if such a place existed.

Occupational hazard: If you write against the government, the editor could be framed on charges of having links with militant organisations.

Insecurity: You could be fired AT any time. Also beaten up or ex-communicated from society.

News management: Deciding whether to put something on Page 1, as demanded by a militant organisation, or try to get away with publishing it as a Letter to the Editor, and face the consequences tomorrow.

Just as it is difficult to talk about the Indian media as a whole, one cannot talk about media in the north-east as a homogenous unit. It covers the whole spectrum of more than 300 communities, just as many languages, and almost double the number of dialects. Still, there are some common features which distinguish it from the media in the rest of India.

One is that communication is a one-way process: the area gets all the national news, but news from the north-east, barring violent incidents, never makes it to the national media. Extraordinary things happen all the time which we never hear of - good copy, with all the local colour an editor could ask for.

A second binding factor is the fear of the gun under which the media operates. The physical safety of mediapersons is under constant threat. The seething tensions, the presence of the underground and its corollary, the large paramilitary presence, all make the pursuit of news a perilous process. "What do they threaten to do?` I naively asked some journalist colleagues from the region while interviewing them for this piece. They laughed dryly. "Death is the only punishment thought fit," replied one. "More editors have been killed in this region than in any other in the last few decades." Yet that does not seem to have prevented many young people, including girls, from deciding to make a career of it.

There is clear and present danger all the time. For instance in Shillong, which has three local cable networks, a militant group wanted the airing of a propaganda tape it had made to celebrate its founding day, which included its training camps. One network decided to show it in full, an act which led to the arrest of its producer.

Another, a Khasi language newsmagazine, decided to do a tightrope act, balancing the two sides. "Not to have shown it would have been a problem", recalls one of the editors. "Militants often want coverage of their foundation day. But they don`t want us to do an objective job."