Crime reporters: The journalists who know too much
The dastardly killing of J Dey, Mid-Day’s special investigations editor, in Mumbai, the second since January this year, underlines the precarious lives of crime reporters,
says GEETA SESHU
Mumbai Mid-Day’s editor (Special Investigations) J Dey was shot dead at 2.45p.m. on Saturday, June 12, 2011. He was 56. Oblivious of the pouring rain, the four young men in motorcycles pumped bullets into his body and fled, leaving behind a trail of blood and questions for which there are no easy answers.
Police have no leads at present about his killers and are investigating both whether the killings were in retaliation to any of his stories or to any personal enmity. In a
statement, Mid-Day newspaper said that Dey was a mentor “to
budding crime reporters. His loss to journalism, therefore, is irreparable. MID DAY will not speculate on the circumstances that led to his murder, and will cooperate with the Mumbai Police at every step in the investigation.”
Dey was facing a trial for defamation in the chief metropolitan magistrate’s court for an article he had written on July 14, 2005 on the occasion of the launch the Hindustan Times in Mumbai – tapes of a conversation allegedly between Bollywood actors Salman Khan and Aishwarya Rai where the former boasts of his connections with the underworld. The tapes, a government forensic lab later said, were fabricated.
June 14, 2011 update:
The investigations on Dey’s death took an interesting turn with the transfer of Anil Mahabole, the Assistant Commissioner of Police of Azad Maidan Police Station to the Small Arms Unit late Monday night. It is believed that Mahabole figured prominently in a confidential report Dey had handed over to Maharashtra Home minister R R Patil last month.
Mahabole had, in 2005, filed a criminal defamation case against Dey, the hearings for which were still on at the time of his death, the legal head of Hindustan Times Manoj Bhargava told the Free Speech Hub. The case came about in the context of the Salman Khan tapes story, when Dey had written about the nexus between the underworld and the police. He had mentioned some police officers, including Mahabole.
Dey is the second journalist to be murdered this year, the first being Umesh Rajput, a journalist with Nai Duniya, who was shot dead in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, on January 23. There are still no leads in his case.A note, stating "Khabar chaapna band nahi karoge toh mare jaoge" (If you don't stop publishing news, you will die), was found near the crime scene.
On December 20 last year, another journalist from Chhattisgarh, Sushil Pathak, was shot dead outside his residence. He was President of the Bilaspur Press C``lub. Again, there was no progress in investigations. It took till February this year for Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh to agree to the opposition demand for a CBI probe into his death.
Dey, who started working in the Indian Express in 1995, was a late entrant to journalism. He used to write on environment and published photographs on wildlife and was a trekking enthusiast. Dey began writing about crime and in Mid-Day, he had been writing a series of article on the extensive smuggling of diesel by the oil mafia through the sea route and the series of stories had definitely affected the illegal trade, says his colleague Akela (pen name for Tarakant Dwiwedi).
Akela, who worked under Dey as Principal Correspondent and also worked on several investigations under the guidance of his senior colleague, was arrested under the Official Secrets Act last month for an article he had written in the Mumbai Mirror, more than a year ago, when he was a staffer there, about the poor condition of the armoury maintained by the Railway Protection Force.
Incidentally, Mahabole was the same police officer who had threatened Akela. Mahabone came to the railway police lock-up. An inquiry was instituted against him by the Joint Commissioner of Police (Law and Order) Rajneesh Sheth. Akela added that the police officer was also very annoyed with Dey for taking such an interest in Akela’s case and helping to release the latter.
“Dey was a great help to me when I was arrested and maybe this was not liked by some people,” he said. But I’m not frightened. I’m going to carry on the work he started, Akela said.
Perils of crime reporting
Dey’s death, shocking though it is, has put under the scanner the perils of crime reportage, an area of journalism that rarely gets much attention despite the fact that media houses give it so much importance. In the post-liberalisation age, with media houses in intense competition to break stories and grab eyeballs, the coverage of crime takes centre stage, displaced only by political happenings or by disasters.
Major media houses employ more than four crime reporters, with stringers to back them up. Crime reporters are constantly on edge, depending either on police sources or on underworld contacts for their information. It becomes difficult to find a balance and Akela says that it becomes even more difficult if the crime reporter does ‘real’ investigation, not merely depending on police press notes or police briefings. “Our sources are everywhere, the underworld and the police, customs, navy....,” he adds.
Often, crime reporters actually publish far less than they really know. “Sometimes, we can’t get proof for everything we do know,” says veteran crime reporter and Janmabhoomi staffer, Surendra Modi.
But while crime reporting gets keener with more competition, it has had an impact on the quality of reportage. As copy becomes more colourful, journalists blithely use nicknames of underworld gangsters or attribute information to underworld sources. But that’s not all.
Writing about the changes in reporting Mumbai’s crime scene, in an article
Dial ‘P’ for “Encounter”, well-known crime journalist and former editor of ‘The Free Press Journal’, Prabhat Sharan questions the terminology of crime reporting and the use of the term ‘ encounter specialist’ to describe trigger-happy police officers. The latter are made into heroes by the media, he rues.
A number of these so-called ‘encounter specialists’ used the media to plant stories about their encounters and no one cross-checks who they actually killed. The spate of encounters helped politicians keep in check builders who were riding the real estate boom of the late nineties and the 2000-2010 decade. The faction-ridden police in Mumbai is also highly politicised and seeks to extract its pound of flesh from journalists, in exchange for the information they disclose.
Writing about the relationship between the politician and the underworld, with the police playing good cop, bad cop, becomes a minefield for news-hungry journalists.
But as the law caught up with these trigger-happy police officer and the wealth they amassed, the media they nurtured also began to fall apart. And when journalists like Dey continued to report about the police and the underworld, they flew too close to the sun for comfort.