Not touching this hot potato?

BY sevanti ninan| IN Opinion | 27/06/2013

The ecological cost of pilgrimage tourism whether in the UP hills or in Amarnath, either does not capture media imagination, or is something it chooses not to focus on,

says SEVANTI NINAN. PIX: Narendra Modi on 2-day visit to Uttarakhand.

TALKING MEDIA

Sevanti Ninan

Floods don’t always bring a media flood of attention, this time they did. There were good reasons: one, the victims were not faceless in composition; they were middle class pilgrims, many of them from metropolitan India. You could track down their families in the cities you were publishing from. Two, the disaster has the potential for politicisation and therefore controversy. Three, physically the area was within reach from Delhi where much of the media is based. Four, environment is a saleable issue to fall back on when you go for incessant channel chatter. And that underpinning was there to this story.

Deriving from the last point is a question--how good are journalists at explaining? Breaking down the issues involved, and documenting them? TV reporters, anchors, print honchos? Many made the effort, more in print than TV, and in one case, the Deccan Chronicle, through pictures and extended captions, on the Web. Yet in both television discussion and print reporting and analysis the issue that got short shrift was the role of unchecked religious tourism.

The ecological cost of pilgrimage tourism whether in the UP hills or in Amarnath either does not capture media imagination, or is something it chooses not to focus on. Climate change and hydel dams are rightly discussed, but shouldn’t the media start discussing reining in the number of pilgrims allowed, which has climbed some several hundred percent over the past decade leading to increased road and hotel building? Did journalists ask politicians their view on this? After all the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) chose to politicise this issue back in 2008 when the land transfer of close to a 100 acres to the Amarnath Shrine Board was revoked. Bashing hydel projects is safer.

The few who did specific stories provided documentation which can hardly be ignored. Chetan Chauhan in the Hindustan Times cited right to information data to show that Badrinath and Kedarnath between them have witnessed almost a four-fold increase in visitors in a decade, accompanied by a rise in packages offered by tour operators, and a five-time increase in vehicle registration in the state with 70% of them devoted to passenger ferrying services. More cars and buses need more roads. Jay Mazoomdaar in Tehelka talks of how too many road projects have become a curse of the hills, with irresponsible blasting leading to landslides. It is nothing short of cynical if star anchors on TV will not even attempt to unravel all this and connect the dots, but seize on floggable political angles. A Times Now line up over the past seven days proves the point:”Politics over Relief” in four parts, “Indifference to loss & untouched by grief?” in two parts, “VIPs and Visits” in three parts, and so on.

As R Jagannathan pointed out in Firstpost last August, religious tourism in India and elsewhere is killing the environment. Given the enormous suffering pilgrim traffic paid this time as a price, it was an appropriate time to have focused on this issue, dispassionately and non-mischieviously. Hopefully a prime ministerial statement yesterday on this specific issue, the need to regulate religious tourism in the country, will give TV debates something to seize on constructively.

Tailpiece

There is an old biblical adage which says when you do alms do not let your left hand know what your right is doing. Now that makes no sense in a media age. So three examples of publicised altruism leapt out last week, the most famous being the Modi miracle of rescuing 15000 stranded pilgrims over a weekend. Full of nitty gritty detail (80 Innovas, four Boeings) all unattributed to any source, a Times of India exclusive. The paper did nothing to retract it but let a writer knock down the story in its lead edit page article on July 26. Is this a new pragmatic way of disowning a dud? The Times Now video on the same story merely had footage of the CM in a vehicle. It offered no visual evidence of any airlift or any convoy of luxury buses transporting “grateful people.”

Then there was Mr Naveen Jindal’s PR machine telling us that a chartered plane and helicopters had been deployed by him to transport relief materials and ferry rescued pilgrims. Photographs were helpfully provided.

Finally cricketer Harbhajan Singh provided an example of the left hand announcing what the right hand was yet to do. NDTV.com informed us that he had decided to donate Rs 10 lakh for relief work in Uttarakhand, having been in the region when calamity struck.