The politics of television in the 2002 Gujarat riots

Interpreting Media

October 2010

As part of The Hoot’s continuing commitment toward creating greater media awareness and fostering debates related to media issues we are excerpting a second passage from Nalin Mehta’s India on Television. New extracts will be posted on the site every month and readers are invited to send in comments, book recommendations, and reviews.

Nalin Mehta’s study while filling the ‘satellite-size gap in the scholarship of Indian television’ analyses the local and global nature of India’s television industry. He focuses on the economic, political, and cultural factors that determine programming and content and the implications thereof. The second extract focuses on the challenges of covering ‘live’ communal riots on 24/7 news channels. It examines the variegated coverage and the politics of the differing perspectives on air along with the reactions of the governments at the Centre and in Gujarat. The analysis highlights the interface between television, violence and politics in the context of the 2002 Gujarat riots.

Nalin Mehta. India on Television: How Satellite News Channels Have Changed the Way We Think and Act. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2008. http://www.harpercollins.co.in/BookDetail.asp?Book_Code=1922

Nalin Mehta. India on Television: How Satellite News Channels Have Changed the Way We Think and Act. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2008.

393 pages/Hardback: Rs. 495 (978-81-7223-726-4)

Excerpted with permission of Harper Collins.

 ‘TV Waale Sab Chor Hai’: Annals of Gujarat

On 15 December 2002, a few hours after sweeping back to power with a massive victory in the Gujarat assembly elections, Chief Minister Narendra Modi was questioned in an interview with the Star News channel about the feelings of insecurity and anxiety that still prevailed among Gujarat’s minorities. It was a potentially awkward question coming after an election fought over the worst outbreak of Hindu–Muslim violence India had seen in a decade, one in which Modi’s government had been accused of siding with the Hindu rioters and then gone on to campaign on a staunchly Hindu nationalist plank. But the chief minister did not blink: ‘What insecurity are you talking about?’ he countered. ‘People like you should apologise to the 5 crore (50 million) Gujaratis for asking such questions. Have you not learnt your lesson? If you continue like this, you will have to pay the price.’ This public threat, delivered on television, drew the curtain on a year of tension between the television networks and the BJP establishment.2 Even as the chief minister’s interview was being recorded at the BJP headquarters in Ahmedabad, other journalists like NDTV’s Barkha Dutt and Aaj Tak’s Deepak Chaurasiya had to escape with the aid of a water pipe at the back of the building to avoid being confronted by a mob of Modi supporters outside. Television crews from various channels were attacked elsewhere in the city that day as well, and an Outside Broadcast van belonging to Aaj Tak emerged from one such encounter with a telling message crudely scrawled all over it—’TV waale sab chor hai’ [All TV guys are thieves].3

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Television, Violence and Politics

When is a Muslim a ‘Muslim’? Rewriting the Rules

The Gujarat violence began with an attack at Godhra on a train carrying kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya.13 The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) had issued an ultimatum that it would begin construction of a Ram temple at the disputed Ram Janmabhoomi–Babri Masjid site at Ayodhya by 15 March 2002 and the kar sevaks had been part of the VHP’s mobilisation in the town. They were now returning home. But after an altercation with some local Muslims at the Godhra railway station, 58 kar sevaks were burnt alive on the morning of 27 February 2002. By afternoon, all three major television networks had the images on air—bodies burnt beyond recognition being taken out of train carriages by rescue workers as the embers still smouldered around them.14 Facing their first ‘live’ communal riot, India’s young television networks had to deal with a serious problem that American networks had faced in 1957 in Arkansas during the first phase of rioting. There were simply no pre-established norms or precedents for them to go by. In the words of Robert Schakne of CBS News: ‘We knew how to cover stories as newspapers covered stories, but we were inventing television’.15 This is pretty much what the Indian channels did in Gujarat—they simply created new rules of engagement in journalism as they went along and this, as we shall see, created a serious political problem.

The conventions of riot coverage for Indian newspapers had long been established but there were none for live television. As one television editor puts it: ‘Television is a newspaper that comes out every second. A newspaper goes to sleep at its deadline and however big the news, if the newspaper has gone to print, it will have to wait till the next day. But a news channel never sleeps.’16 The nature of 24-hour news meant that the Indian news channels were working within what Brent MacGregor calls an ‘atomic watch culture’, collecting and disseminating news in real time with very limited reaction time for editorial decisions.17 When the first pictures of the Godhra violence were telecast on February 27, all three major television networks—Zee News, Aaj Tak and Star News—broke with the established print ‘convention’ of not naming the religion of the victims of a communal riot: all three channels carried blaring headlines about the killing of Ram sevaks.18 The logic behind the old print convention had been that identifying the victims as Hindus or Muslims could inflame passions and lead to revenge attacks. Television, with its visual images facilitating identification, made the old print convention more or less redundant.

However, from February 28 onwards, by which time Muslims were targeted in revenge killings, both Aaj Tak and Zee News reverted to the old print practice of not naming the religious community of the victims. Indeed Aaj Tak repeatedly advised its reporters to avoid terms like minority and majority. At Star News (then under editorial control of NDTV), on the other hand, a conscious editorial decision was taken—at least for the first few days of the violence—that identifying the community of the victims was essential to a truthful telling of the story of the violence. Thereafter ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’ featured constantly in its coverage. As Barkha Dutt, one of the channel’s senior editors and news anchors intimately involved in the riot coverage explained later: ‘Naming the community under siege in Gujarat was moot to the story. In fact it was the story, revealing as it did a prejudiced administrative and political system that was happy to stand by and watch. Isn’t it a journalist’s job then to tell the story?’19 It must be stressed here, though, that Aaj Tak’s editorial policy was not necessarily anti-Muslim, as some commentators have suggested.20 At a seminar in March 2002, Aaj Tak’s then news director Uday Shankar, justified his channel’s policy of not naming the community of the victims but defended the right of other channels to identify communities. One man’s responsibility was another man’s censorship and vice versa, he contended.21 In a later submission to the Editors Guild of India’s enquiry into the riots, Shankar also stressed the editorial difficulties involved in live coverage, which requires television reporters to piece together masses of bits of information and to ‘background’ and analyse them, even as events continue to unfold.22 The key point is that crisis coverage on live television uses different tools from print journalism, and that there are practical difficulties in rigidly applying the same rules of editorial gate-keeping.

‘Pictures are the point of television news’, declaims former NBC news president Reuven Frank. Indeed, Frank is one of many commentators inside and outside the industry who believe that television is a more useful medium than print journalism to portray certain events, precisely because pictures can say things that newspaper writers cannot say.23 The BJP government of Gujarat learnt this the hard way. By the second day of the violence, the television images of continuing violence—at a time when the government was claiming everything was under control—were starting to create a problem for the ruling BJP establishment. Accordingly, it moved to rein in the news channels—starting with Star News, which as we have seen had adopted a policy of pointing out the deliberate targeting of Muslim victims by, amongst others, sections of the police force. In this it had the full support of the BJP-dominated coalition government at the centre. On March 1, then Union law minister Arun Jaitely, in a live interview with Zee News, accused ‘some television networks’ of inflaming passions in a conspiracy to topple the government. The anchor running the interview immediately assured the minister of his network’s support, and openly ‘celebrated’ on air the state government’s decision to censor or blackout channels…virtually justifying the line that the media was responsible for inflaming passions.’24 The pressure was beginning to tell.

Yet Star News, or rather, NDTV which ran the channel at the time, refused to toe the line, prompting the Gujarat government to ban its telecast the next day. Chief Minister Narendra Modi justified the ban saying: ‘I blacked out one channel because of the provocative reporting methods used. Traditionally the print media has used its own methods of self-censorship not to mention the names of communities while reporting riots. If every half an hour names of communities are going to be mentioned, without any substantiation or any attribution, it inflames the situation instead of allaying it. It is not difficult to see what impact it will have.’25

Notes

2. ‘Star News’ interview with Narendra Modi was conducted by NDTV’s then managing editor, Rajdeep Sardesai, and I have borrowed his description of the event. See Sardesai, ‘Drawing the Ram-Rekha’.

3. The author was a member of one of the Star News teams that was attacked outside the Ahmedabad BJP office on 15 December 2002.

13. Kar seva is a form of worship through work performed collectively, and kar sevaks are those who perform it. The term has been appropriated by the Hindu nationalist movement as a form of political activism aimed at building the Ram temple at Ayodhya. The term was adopted in a VHP meeting at Hardwar on 23-24 June 1990. See Rajagopal, Politics after Television, p. 317.

14. The exact sequence of events at Godhra and how the ill-fated S-6 coach of the Sabarmati Express was burnt is a highly contentious issue with a police forensic enquiry suggesting that the coach was burnt from inside rather than by an attacking mob from outside. After the Congress-led UPA government came to power in 2004, the new Union Railways Minister Lalu Prasas Yadav renewed the controversy by ordering a fresh enquiry headed by a retired High Court judge, Justice U.C. Bannerjee, in July 2004. The Bannerjee Report was released just before the Bihar assembly election in 2005 and came to the conclusion that the fire was accidental and the coach was not set on fire from outside. Its content and timing of its release by Lalu Yadav became a contentious political issue in the Bihar assembly elections of 2005.

15. Donovan and Scherer, Unsilent Revolution, p. 4.

16. Interview with Debang, managing editor, NDTV India, New Delhi, 20 Dec. 2004.

17. For more on the notion of ‘atomic watch culture’, see Brent MacGregor, Live, Direct and Biased? Making Television News in the Satellite Age (London: Arnold), 1997, p. 65.

18. The term Ram sevaks – literally ‘servants of Ram’ – is often used interchangeably with kar sevaks.

19. Barkha Dutt, ‘Covert Riots and Media’, Outlook, 25 March 2002, http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20020325&fname=Column+Barkha+Dutt+%28F%29&sid=1 [accessed 22 Sep. 2004]

20. See Anil Chamaria, ‘Hindi TV and Gujarat Violence’, in Kathadesh (2002), reproduced in Siddharth Varadarajan (ed.), Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy (New Delhi: Penguin), 2002, pp. 300-03.

21. ‘TV News Gathering: Responsibility Issues’, (16 March 2002), www.indiantelevision.com/special/y2k2/ficci/ficspi18.htm [accessed 15 June 2004].

22. Aakar Patel, Dileep Padgaonkar and B.G. Verghese, ‘Rights and Wrongs, Ordeal by Fire in the Killing Fields of Gujarat, Editors Guild Fact Finding Mission Report’, New Delhi, 3 May 2002, reproduced on http://www.sabrang.com/gujarat/statement/report.htm [accessed 19 Sep.2003].

23. Frank’s reference is to the civil rights movement. Reuven Frank, Out of Thin Air: The Brief Wonderful Life of Network News (New York: Simon & Schuster), 1991, pp. 41-50.

24. Rajdeep Sardesai, ‘Drawing the Ram-Rekha’ Seminar, Vol. 533 (Jan. 2004), http://www.india-seminar.com/2004/533/533%20rajdeep%20sardesai.htm [accessed 15 June 2004]. Sardesai describes the incident, without naming the channel or the politician, but the author was with Sardesai in Ahmedabad when he saw the telecast on 1 March 2002. The same night, soon after the interview on Zee, Arun Jaitley and Sardesai, as managing editor of NDTV (Star News), engaged in a heated debate on the issue of the media’s culpability on Star News’ Newshour programme.

25. Interview with Ranjit Bhushan, Outlook, internet edition, 18 March 2002. http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=2002031&&fname=Cover+Stories&sid=4 [accessed 25 Sept. 2004].