Missing links in Durga Shakti story

HERE’S LOOKING AT US
Jyoti  Punwani

As the Durga Shakti story played out day after day in the media, it seemed a simple enough tale of politicians playing the communal card to get rid of an honest bureaucrat who had become a thorn in their flesh. The District Magistrate’s (DM) report, the Samajwadi leaders’ public and private pronouncements and the demolition of a temple in the same area earlier – everything was adding up.

But there was one omission – the voice of those whose mosque had been demolished. It was they who had been ready to riot, hence the officer’s immediate suspension, according to the Samajwadi Party. And it was they who had peacefully brought down the mosque wall, according to the DM’s report. Where was their version? Muslim leaders were quoted; but not the Muslims actually involved.

It was only CNN-IBN that carried a report from the village two days after the demolition. The villagers while asserting that this had become a political issue, made no bones about their anger at the IAS officer. In the English press, Mail Today first carried a report from the village on July 31, which went against the mainstream media narrative. The Hindu followed on August 5, eight days after Durga Shakti Nagpal’s suspension had started making news. These reports portrayed a different picture altogether. The young woman we had been seeing on our screens who seemed so gentle, emerged as a brash, imperious officer with little patience for people’s religious feelings. Why couldn’t she have given the villagers time to produce the necessary documents as they requested? Couldn’t she have at least waited till Eid?  Would doing so have meant leaving the field open for political interference, which would have ensured that the wall never got demolished? Or would it have set a precedent that the young officer did not want? Or was the choice not hers to be made – she was simply following orders?

The DM could have been asked these questions. At the very least, they ought to have been debated by the celebrated panelists, including IAS officers, who appeared almost every day on TV channels, which have taken up the suspension as a campaign. They would have added complexity to the debates which were more or less predictable, with the panelists abusing the Samajwadi government for its shoddy treatment of bureaucrats and its vote-bank politics. What stopped the major news channels (apart from CNN-IBN) from sending a reporter to Kadalpur, which is not far from Delhi? Not even Headlines Today, part of the same media group that carried the first print report (in English) from Kadalpur, bothered to do so. Why?

On August 7, a full 10 days after the story had been making ‘page one’ news on a daily basis, theIndian Express and DNA carried reports from the village. They confirmed what the others had reported.

By then the damage had been done. Away from the 24/7 media scrutiny, the Urdu press had already sent its reporters to Kadalpur. The villagers’ anger and pictures of the demolished wall had already entered the consciousness of thousands of Muslims. And Englishperiodicals and websites catering to Muslims had carried these reports that seemed to justify the suspension. Once again, a clear divide had emerged between the English media’s interpretation of the incident, and what many Muslims believed.

Translations from the Urdu press carried by the Milli Gazette mention nothing but the villagers’ anguish. Did the Urdu press cover the other factors linked to the demolition at all? Not knowing Urdu, it’s difficult to say. But the reporting in the English Muslim media was one-sided as it always is; or, to be fair, it was as one-sided as that of the English mainstream media which left out the villagers’ voices (barring the above-mentioned exceptions that reported from the village soon after the demolition). In the Muslim websites, no mention was made of a temple having been demolished earlier; nor of the facts that led to a reasonable conclusion that Durga Shakti’s drive against the sand mafia was the real cause of her suspension. A sting operation conducted by the Hindi news channel AajTak had Samajwadi Party leader Kailash Bhati saying this in so many words. No reference was made to this operation.

So, if the English media, specially the electronic media (but for CNN-IBN), presented a black-and-white picture of the incident, so did the English websites catering to Muslims. Indeed, Zafarul-Islam Khan, editor of the Milli Gazette, which describes itself as “Indian Muslims’ leading newspaper”,  went so far as to abuse the English media as “the blackmailer-paid-news-media donning the patriotic garb” in a front-page article titled “Is Durga Shakti really innocent?” Referring to news reports in the “24x7 media” about the demolition of “a place of worship”, he added in a snide parenthesis: “(read mosque-can she touch any other community’s place of worship?)”, completely ignoring reports about the earlier demolition of a temple in her jurisdiction. An article in twocircles.net (a Muslim website), accusing the suspended SDM of “acts of communalism”, said that the villagers were “emboldened” to demolish the wall because they received “protection” from Durga Shakti who was present with a large posse of policemen. It was the restraint of the Muslims that prevented a riot, said the article. The implication was that Hindu villagers had demolished the wall in front of the Muslims – an allegation made neither by the villagers in any of the reports, nor by those who ordered and/or defended her suspension. Nor did the twocircles.net report substantiate this allegation.

But in this campaign, the English media didn’t cover itself with glory either. Apart from largely ignoring the villagers, the TV channels acted boorishly with the Samajwadi leaders they invited to their discussions. Again, CNN-IBN’s Bhupendra Chaubey was the exception. True to form, Arnab Goswami (Times Now) kept pouncing on Bukkal Nawab, Samajwadi Party MLC, not allowing him to complete a single sentence and asking others to rebut him before he could finish. Rahul Kanwal (Headlines Today), similarly gave short shrift to Abdul Qadir Chawdhary, another SP spokesman, mocking him for sipping water before replying, looking at him with obvious irritation as he spoke, and dismissing him with a “you have already made up your mind” - as if his other panelists and he himself hadn’t! What made his behaviour worse was the way he repeatedly turned to the BJP’s Meenakshi Lekhi to counter Chawdhary’s unfinished remarks, as if she was his ally. Making any panelist an ally is unprofessional enough; but making one political spokesperson an ally against another from a rival party is more than unprofessional. Even Barkha Dutt, who normally allows her guests to finish their argument, did not extend the same courtesy to Samajwadi strongman Narendra Bhati.

Had she done so, an interesting fact would have emerged. Bhati started by saying that after the temple had been demolished in the same area, Durga Shakti had tried to take away the idols, and was prevented from doing so by the people there. At that time, he said, the same parties who were now making a hoo-ha, had accused his government of being anti-Hindu and of not taking any action.  Now when a mosque wall was demolished and his government had acted… Alas! He was not allowed to finish an argument that would have exposed the BJP’s and Congress’ double standards.

Strangely, newspapers are reporting versions of the same incidents that don’t tally. The Hindu quoted the temple devotees as saying that Durga Shakti had nothing to do with the temple demolition. Similarly, in The Hindu, the Muslim villagers contradicted the DM’s claim that they themselves had demolished the mosque wall. Some reports said that Hindu villagers had also contributed to building the mosque; but NDTV interviewed a Hindu villager who had come to complain to the DM that Muslim villagers had encroached upon his land to build an approach road to the mosque. And on August 8, the Indian Express reported that it was a Hindu with Congress links who had complained to the DM about the mosque encroaching on his brother’s land.

It is sad that reports from a village not far from the capital should be so clouded in contradictions. While the political reportage of the way in which leaders moved to ensure the officer’s suspension gave a clear picture of the vested interests at play, an equally comprehensive reportage of the demolition of both temple and mosque, is still to appear. Without that, one cannot get a clear picture of the communal dimensions of this incident, which are crucial to understanding it. What does this show? That reporters have good sources in the bureaucracy, the police and the politicians, but not among the people, or at least, not with villagers?

Incidentally, after Samajwadi Party health minister Ahmed Hasan abused the media over its glorification of that “nasamajh (foolish) SDM”, UP CM Akhilesh Yadav, who sat through it all, told journalists: “Jo saathi naaraz hain unko hamare taraf se rasgullaen pahuncha dena” (send rasgollas from my side to those friends who are angry). That’s the way politicians, with whom many of us flaunt our closeness, regard the media.