Racism in Indian Media

Media, in India is often touted as the guardian angel of democratic principles. Since Edmund Burke, the “fourth estate” has been regarded as something that checks and if need be, re-balances the division of power(s). I would credit the media to, more often than not, be doing an exemplary role in acting as a controlling factor that prevents the executive and legislature from going significantly against the wishes of the majority of people, criticizing the state in situations where it crosses some unwritten thresholds. However having said that the media is not perfect, nor should I expect it to be.

I have always been skeptical about the role of media in India. This is not to downsize the role they have played in what India has grown to be today, this is in no way to malign the toil, hardwork, bravery and integrity of some of the most talented men and women who have braved the odds to bring us news about the positive and negative happenings to our television screens, newspapers or the internet portals. In many cases, the media has played a crucial role in swinging public opinion, the most recent example that comes to my mind is that of the highlight of India Against Corruption movement in the earlier part of this decade. However, they do, sometimes, tend to go south. A penchant for increased TRPs or overtaking a competitor, news is often sensationalized and misquoted. There are instances where I have read news items which have got their facts wrong and a lot of media houses lack the grace to publish an admission of error or a letter of apology. Quoting “unnamed or undisclosed sources”, for many, seems to have become a way to stuff their personal or organizational opinions and ideologies as news event than news analyses.

However I write this piece to ponder upon my thoughts that media in India is getting especially negligent about news from North Eastern states of India. I’d go a step to cal it the racist attitude of the mainstream media in India. Yes, I know I am entitled to a criticism that this is more of a issue of regionalism, but I think I’d rather call it racism. Why? Because the media often quotes this term. Not against itself, but against us, the citizens of India.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that we, the people are racist. Okay, my definition of the term racism is strictly not according to how Wikipedia defines it. Most people of India are biased against the people from their own region of birth, against the people who do not share their mother tongue or their cultural background. I am from a state in Southern India who had the luck to go for my undergraduate degree in a college in the Hindi heartland in North India. I faced issues, mostly miniscule and negligible but issues they indeed were, where I was typecast into a stereotypical South Indian and judged, analyzed more based on that than who I was. I am certain that there would be many North Indians who would have faced the same issues in Southern India. That I think is quite understandable (and if you ask me, made for a lot of instances for me and my friends from across India to sit around tables and cafeterias and share a laugh!) and as long as it does not cause significant physical or mental agony, it should be something that is taken as the natural fabric that comes with a country as diverse as ours. However sometimes, incidents happen that do cross the unwritten barriers of physical or mental agony and cannot be ignored. That happens mostly with people from the North Eastern parts of India.

Yes, people who natively belong to states in North East, are most often, from a different race as the rest of India. And incidents happen when they are targeted for their race or ethnicity in other parts of India. Atrocious incidents have happened in Indian cities of Bengaluru, Mumbai, New Delhi etc, with increasing frequency. Whenever such instances happen, the media highlights the issue. There are endless debates and editorial pieces condemning the attacks. But amidst the din and charade that accompanies the debates and the glorified condemnations, you, I and the presenters miss one point – that the media themselves are racist.

The incident that prompted me to write this piece, to title this piece as it is, was the coverage of floods that ravaged the North Eastern states of India last month. And the stark contrast to the way the media covered the floods in Jammu and Kashmir this year and the floods in Uttarakhand towards the middle of last year. Almost all national media competed stiffly (and I would add, commendably) in covering the floods that occurred in Jammu and Kashmir, the impact, the severity, the rescue and relief and a host of other related aspects. A lot of them telecast their prime news reports from ground in Kashmir. But no media house (at least among the ones I follow) showed the same fervor and arduousness when covering the floods that ravaged in Assam and Meghalaya the very same month. When the waters started receding from Jammu and Kashmir, water levels started rising somewhere far east in the country, mainly in the states of Assam and Meghalaya. Surprisingly, the cyber world seems to be no less culpable. Wikpedia, which is the venerated encyclopedia of anything and everything, has no page related to the floods in North Eastern India. The page of List of 2014 disasters in India is conspicuous by the absence of North East floods. Normally I wouldn't have placed this arbitration against the media because it is quite understandable the amount of coverage their editorial boards decide to give various incidents. But this time, I think it went too far. Someone like me, who regularly surfs multiple media websites daily for news updates, came to know of the floods in Assam almost a full three days after they first reportedly happened. And if I consider myself an averagely avid news junkie, I can be uncomfortably reasonably sure that this news did not reach a significant households in India outside of the affected region. The media which is reputed in conducting periodic autopsies of the symbolic and on-the-ground acts of the new Union Cabinet, covered the visit of Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi to Jammu and Kashmir with true importance it deserved. However, the news item about Mr. Tarun Gogoi’s criticism that Mr. Narendra Modi did not visit the flood hit regions in the North East (which I think is quite matter-of-fact) gained only scant coverage in the media. Why, media? When you declare the majority of Indians as being biased against people from the North East, did you give a thought to look inside your own house to see if everything was well?

To me, it seems absolutely pointless that there needs to be some sort of communique from People’s Republic of China for Arunachal Pradesh to get a mention in the mainstream news media. It is pointless to talk about Manipur when and only when there is some news around Irom Sharmila. As long as the news media maintain this lackadaisical attitude, the citizens from other parts of India will continue to remain unaware and alienated from that part of their own country. And when a part of your citizenry do not get their fair share of exposure from the mainstream media, they are right to be felt ostracized and alienated. As much as “we” do not make “them” feel a part of the same country by all those dastardly acts, these kind of acts from the media would no doubt make “them” feel less integrated into the fabric of India. The blame certainly does lie with the citizens of other parts in the country, but some of the buck stops right in front of the media houses in India. 

Disaster Management in India

October 12 is the date of my birth. So by the standards propounded by the bourgeois and elites worldwide, I am supposed to celebrate it in a pomp and spectacular way, at least on a personal note. However, this year and the last, two of the hardest disasters India has faced in her recent past have chosen to hit the land on that very (in)auspicious day – Cyclone Phailin in 2013 and Cyclone Hudhud in 2014. Both of them, categorized by the India Meteorological Department (IMD) as “Very Severe Cyclonic Storm” as they made landfall along the Coromandel coastline in south-eastern India.

India is a densely populated country and thus, any natural (or man-made) disaster is, bound to impact several thousands of people by simple arithmetic logic. More so in case of cyclones because their direct zone of impact generally tends to span tens of kilometers into hinterland. Yet what stands out impressive, if I may be permitted to use the word, is the casualty figures. Fewer than 50 people were reported dead in the state of Odisha due to Cyclone Phailin, of which more than half was a result of floods which were a result of the cyclone. The number of deaths caused by Cyclone Hudhud has also been significantly low so far, it stands at 41. Of these 38 were in the state of Andhra Pradesh, which was where Cyclone Hudhud made landfall and 3 were in the neighboring state of Odisha.

The lessons for this success started in the failure that accompanied the Super Cyclone which hit Odisha in 1999. Official figures put the death toll in that cyclone to be around 10,000.It seems that the governments of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh learnt, in a bitter way, about what could go wrong in that instance. It is a combination of that which resulted in better preparedness of the state government machinery, plus the advancements in climatic monitoring technologies and smooth co-ordination of the multitude of bodies like the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and the Indian armed forces. For over a week before Cyclone Hudhud struck the eastern coast of India, IMD started putting out bulletins related to the various aspects of the impending storm – the movement, the speeds and other related information. The IMD, which had issued warning of the 1999 Super Cyclone only about 24 hours prior to it making the landfall, started issuing detailed and accurate warning about Hudhud five days before Cyclone Hudhud struck. And this data was used very productively by governments of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh in pre-emptively relocating populace from the impact zone. The preparedness was phenomenal, and commendable. The prompt predictions from IMD ensured that Odisha administration shifted over 9,00,000 people to safer places before Cyclone Phailin hit the Indian coast. The figure was over 7,00,000 in the state of Andhra Pradesh in case of Cyclone Hudhud this year.

While it is agonizing that it took a super cyclone which cost the lives of over 10,000 people and crores of rupees in terms of economic losses for us to learn the lesson for better preparedness and better disaster management system, the gratifying part is indeed the fact that the lessons have certainly been imbibed. We are much more used to sedentary responses from state governments and their general reluctance to imbibe lessons from the past and inculcate a healthy way of preparedness, the government and bureaucratic machineries of governments of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, along with agencies such as IMD and NDRF have shown us a bright spot indeed worthy of emulation. The other federations in India and the union government itself must take a leaf out of these incidents and replicate it across the country. In a country like India, natural disasters consistently wreak great havoc and it is incumbent upon us to learn the lessons from what happened yesterday so that if the same things happen tomorrow, the impact will be much lesser. The recent floods in Jammu Kashmir, floods in North Eastern states in India, 2013 Uttarakhand Floods and several other incidents in recent and distant past point to a dismal fact, that our levels of preparedness is often caught short. True, quite often it is not possible to predict natural disasters. But disaster is something we need to be prepared for. Every ounce of extra preparedness can make the difference in the life or lives of an individual or a family, a humongous price that justifies the extra preparedness. We now have a rock solid example of how Andhra Pradesh and Odisha did it, clinically. Maybe we should take some time and imbibe that.

In our natural tendency to criticize governments for what they more often than not fail to do, let us warm ourselves to congratulate the governments and the personnel involved for all the efforts they put in to minimize the impact in terms of casualties these cyclonic storms had. The kudos goes to every single known and unknown individual who did their two cents for the country, from that unknown electricity lineman who struggled to restore electricity in some remote colony or village, to those secretaries, ministers and other functionaries of the governments who oversaw the planning and implementation before and after the disaster. Kudos, my fellow countrymen.

Afterthought: For anyone interested in the naming convention of (past and future) cyclonic storms around the northern Indian Ocean, this document provides an interesting insight into the naming convention, so to speak.

Ice Bucket Challenge

It was a day of light showers when I hopped on to a bus that would’ve taken me homeward. There were a group of guys sitting in a section of seats in front of me. All of them seemed to have one of those latest smartphones and needless to say, their attention was riveted on those four or five inches of backlit screens. Possibly due to lack of awareness of propriety that spanned beyond those phone screens, their conversations were loud enough for me to overhear.

“Hey, look at this. Akshay Kumar just took the Ice Bucket Challenge. Hold on, I am sending you the YouTube link.” Said Person A.

“Oh yea, I saw that, someone shared it on my Facebook timeline. He looked cool, didn’t he. He certainly seemed to have a ton of people throwing buckets of ice on him.” Replied Person B.

“Who challenged Akshay Kumar?” Person C was curious.

“I don’t know. I saw Riteish Deshmukh, Abhishek Bachchan and Mandira Bedi’s videos yesterday. I don’t remember the person who challenged Akshay.” Person D chimmed in.

“The ALC Ice Bucket Challenge has gone viral hasn’t it?” asked Person A.

“Oh true. How many people have taken it. Last week I was seeing videos of Harrison Ford, Jennifer Lopez, Steven Spielberg take the ALC challenege.” supported Person B.

“Wait, hold on. Is it the ALC bucket challenge? Wasn’t it something else?” queried Person C

“I think it is ACC. Or maybe was it ACL?” Person D opened up more possibilities.

“Whatever it is, it is funny to see celebrities downing ice buckets like crazy. I love it when those female actors do it, you know. Mandira Bedi, Sunny Leone, Katy Perry, Kaley Cuoco…. You know these damsels make ice bucket challenge real hot.” Person E came out of his silence to add another dimension to the conversation.

“Gwyneth Paltrow as well dude. Did you see her ice bucket challenge? She posted a video of her doing it with a bikini.” Person C chimed in.

“Shut up dude. Respect the cause for this celebration.” Person B silenced Person C.

“I forget what the actual name was. I saw it even today morning in Sonakshi Sinha’s Twitter handle. She had tweeted about it.” Person A was scratching his said.

“You know the funny thing with Sonakshi Sinha, no one challenged her. But still she took it upon herself.” Person B was anecdotal.

“The initials, I think it represents the company that came up with the idea. Think of it, they come up with such an idea, they promote it, and suddenly it looks ‘cool’ to dump a bucket of ice over your head and post the video on Facebook.” Person C shared his wisdom.

“Is it? It is amazing that these marketing people come up with such amazing ideas. Such a ‘cool’ idea of publicizing one’s own products dude.” Person E was not be silenced this time.

“Well, they are paid to do that. And they are paid heavily to do just that my sir.” Person C was supportive.

“No no, I don’t think that’s some company. If that were the case why would people like Bill Gates, Zuckerberg and Bazooka guys do that? Why would they promote some other company than theirs?” Person A was looking at it rationally.

“Bazooka? Who’s Bazooka?” Person B couldn’t recognize.

“You order so much from Amazon, you don’t know the founder of Amazon? That’s Bazooka” Person A retorted with a guffaw.

“It isn’t ACL guys. I googled it, that is Ambuja Cements. Obviously, they have got nothing to do with it.” Person C said without taking his eyes off his phone screen.

“Okay, let me look for ice bucket challenge on Google.” Person A was busy switching windows on his phone to bring up the browser.

“Got it, it is ALS. Ah, they have a big Wikipedia page. Who will read through whatever that is? It doesn’t seem a company because I don’t see a logo in their Wiki page.” Person D emerged triumphant.

“Hey you know what? How about we do this ice bucket thing over the weekend?” Person E suddenly had a brainwave.

“Yea, that’s right. You anyways don’t take bath over the weekend, so it would be certainly beneficial to your flat mates at least..!” Time for a potshot.

“Am not joking. Let’s each do it, make some funny video and put it on Facebook.” Person E ignored the potshot part of the previous commentator.

“What he said makes sense. I’ve not been posting anything on my Facebook wall for a while. If we can make this video funny, I’ll end up getting some ‘cool’ likes.” Person B was supportive.

“Plus let us challenge some girls from office as well. Who knows, they might also do it. Would be fun to watch.” Person C chipped in with an idea.

“We definitely should challenge Person X. He’s a darn coward but his posts in Facebook gives the impression that he is the coolest dude in town. Let’s challenge him, I bet he’ll piss in his pants than take the ice bucket challenge.” Person A was in a vengeful mood.

“Totally agree. I’ve always wanted to expose him, he irritates me posting all those fancy photos and statuses on Facebook.” Person B exhorted.

The automated announcement filtered through the bus’ speakers indicating my stop had reached. I picked up my bag and alighted from my bus and walked away, pretty sure of what was going to appear on the Facebook timelines of these unknown fellow travelers over the next few days.

For the curious, you can read more about Ice Bucket Challenge, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis a.k.a ALS, and ALS Association in the respective links.