Reporting Gujarat: selective contextualisation and editorial amnesia
The
media tore the whole turmoil out of its context and, as Johann Galtung says,
focussed on the irrational without looking at the reasons for the unresolved
conflicts and polarization.
By Dasu Krishnamoorty
The texts of journalists sizzled like the fires of
conflict in Gujarat, unloading on the readers miles of angry prose that is the
envy of Arundhati Roy. Since reporting mainly concerns facts, it loses some of
factualness when narrative is employed as the ballast of the text and facts as
its handmaiden. Narrative has the quality of producing ideological closure
denying the reader an alternative account. In the stampede for outdoing each
other, reporters seem to have forgotten this aspect. Editors had to do a lot of
explaining at seminars and in the columns of their own newspapers to live down
the charge of bias. One crucial way in which reporting is distinguished from
analyses and other forms of editorial exercises is agency-style writing that is
clinical and neutral. It abjures passions and so does not arouse passions. In
times of social strife, it becomes doubly necessary to respect this norm.
Narrative transforms the reporter from an observer of
the event to an interpreter of the event and some times a prosecutor. Religious
strife has always inspired reporters to scale the heights of free verse. Arty
prose either edges out or embellishes facts. A fact-fiction partnership usurps
the traditional story structuring of its functional role. Gujarat riots saw
heavily structured and treated reports. The new tradition began with newsmen
discovering the joys of creative journalism and affiliation to exotic
ideologies. Once a reporter believes in some ¿ism¿, he forfeits his credentials
to be a reporter. The ideology of that ¿ism¿ seeps into his reports too. He
will be an asset for a party journal.
Loss
of Perspective
Since someone has already written for The Hoot on
this aspect of reporting, I will limit myself only to two aspects of our press
in reporting and commenting on the Gujarat riots. One is decontextualisation or
selective contextualisation. The other is editorial amnesia. The trouble began
in Godhra when mobs set ablaze a train carrying kar sewaks returning from
Ayodhya. Next day reprisals started and took more than two months to stop. Now,
to attribute the violence to the goings-on in Ayodhya or the arson at Godhra or
the reaction to it is to drown the real context. I do not deny that hundreds have
been killed or do I deny it is a heinous crime. Those are facts but not all the
facts. But the constant reference to Ayodhya to contextualise the Gujarat
tragedy pushed to the background the original setting that informs all communal
riots in the country.
The media tore the whole turmoil out of its context
and, as Johann Galtung says, focussed on the irrational without looking at the
reasons for the unresolved conflicts and polarization. It is the context of the
event that helps the audience to accomplish a tenable perspective of the event.
Neither the arson at Godhra nor the continuing riots in Ahmedabad are
independent of a past or are sudden and unpredicted occurrences. They were
waiting to happen. This past has been visiting the people repeatedly and ruthlessly:
a past rooted in the partition of the country on the basis of religion. The
founders of the Indian republic embraced secularism but enshrined religion in
the Constitution. The problem started here and without this context all
reporting tends to be one-sided.
Accepting partition on the basis of religion meant
recognition of the thesis that religion could be the context for nation making.
The Constitution sanctified religion by conferring privileges and safeguards on
minorities, on the basis of their faith. This is the genesis of the communal
divide. Several times, the Supreme Court of India tried to define the frontiers
of religious privileges. Nearly every political party, mainly the Congress,
thwarted such efforts. For instance, the bill to reserve seats for women in
Parliament could not even be tabled because the Samajwadi Party demanded that
the seats be distributed on a religious basis. As Jawaharlal Nehru said: If you
seek to give special safeguards to a minority, you isolate it. Maybe, you protect
it, but at what cost? At the cost of isolating it and keeping it away from the
main current in which the majority is going, at the cost of forgetting that
inner sympathy and fellow feeling with the majority.