Workshop on covering communal conflict
Bangalore, June 2002---A Report
Jyoti
Punwani
In what seems to be growing into a trademark of workshops
organized by the Network of Women in Media, the Bangalore workshop on `Covering
Communal Conflict: Lessons from Gujarat 2002¿ left one with no time to breathe.
At the end of two days of talks and discussion, there wasn¿t enough time left
for one of the goals of the workshop, which also turned out to be its most
exciting session: setting up a state-wide network of journalists to facilitate
coverage of communal conflict in Karnataka.
It was with a sense of desperate urgency that some of
the district-level participants continued the meeting left incomplete at the
official venue because it was time for many of their colleagues to catch their
return buses out of Bangalore. As the evening drew to a close, the nucleus of a
state-wide network was formed under the trees outside the ISI, where the state
delegates were staying. The newly-formed `committee¿ resolved to hold its first
workshop in August, at a district headquarters.
That one decision signaled the success of the
workshop held by NWM Bangalore. The three months of violence in Gujarat had
alerted senior members of the NWM to the potential of Karnataka becoming
another Gujarat. Already, the RSS had held three major meetings in the state.
What had appeared to outsiders as an unnecessarily alarmist viewpoint turned
into an uncomfortably grim spectre as correspondent after correspondent
reported on the provocations created by the Bajrang Dal in small towns of the
state. Gauri Lankesh, editor of Lankesh Patrika, completed the dismal picture
with her detailed report of how flashpoints in the state had been covered by
the Kannada press. It was the same old story: reports filed without bothering
to visit the scene, photographs showing only one side of the story, all
together conveying the same message to the reader: that the minority was to
blame everytime.
G N Mohan, News Correspondent, ETV Mangalore, who finally became the convenor
of the new network, pointed out the lack of seriousness with which news about
communal conflict is treated: such situations were regarded as mere law and
order problems and assigned to crime reporters, whereas stories on communal
harmony were never given Page 1 status.
Obviously, the correspondents gathered at the
workshop took a more serious view of such stories. Their reports displayed an
understanding of the complexity of majority-minority relations as well as the
increasing danger of communalisation of the press. They were alarmed by the
hiring of RSS members as stringers by the BJP owned Vijay Karnataka, but
were also quick to add that activities of all kinds of religious extremists,
not only the Bajrang Dal, should be monitored by the press
The correspondents¿ reports were an eye-opener for
the English journalists there, since most of the incidents they described had
never made it to the English press, and Kannada papers were obviously not read
by English journalists.
Fortunately, both the media monitoring reports on Gujarat compiled by NWM Mumbai and NWM Bangalore and presented at the workshop, covered the Indian language press extensively.Both reports proved that the BJP¿s complaint against the English press, that it didn¿t condemn Godhra