The Hindu : Media colluded with war lobby: Shekhawat

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Apr 20, 2003

Southern States

Southern States - Karnataka

Media colluded with war lobby: Shekhawat

By Our Special Correspondent

The Vice-President, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, being greeted by the Karnataka Minister for Forests, K.H. Ranganath, at the international conference organised by the Public Relations Society of India in Bangalore on Saturday. The Governor, T.N. Chaturvedi, is seen. — Photo: T.L. Prabhakar

BANGALORE APRIL 19. The Vice-President, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, has called upon communicators to work with a mission and speed up their efforts to bring about peace.

Inaugurating the International Conference on "Communication for global peace'' organised by the Public Relations Society of India here today, he said that during the Iraq war, newspapers and the electronic media became subservient to the war lobby.

Mr. Shekhawat said that it was often believed that public opinion had little to do with war. Vested interests exerted tremendous influence to derive profit from war.

"I could understand armament manufacturers and dealers, and also capitalists being a party to such an insidious act, but not newspapers and the electronic media. In the Iraq war, peace-promoting communication mediums were glaringly missing.''

He said the media brought a minute-by-minute update of the war with accuracy and precision. But beneath the presentation of details, there remained a welter of emotion, the trauma and travails of countless civilians, the pain and anguish of innocent victims, which could have been more vividly captured to sensitise the world community, including the perpetrators of violence, about the futility of war.

Mr. Shekhawat said the reports pertaining to looting, desecration and vandalism should have been presented more cogently to highlight the irreparable loss to culture and heritage. A country's economic loss could be made good, but the damage to its culture was beyond repair. No reconstruction work could bring back the libraries which were burnt and the museums which were robbed of the artefacts.

He said: "In a nutshell, there has been a perceptible lack of efforts in promoting peace and goodwill among the people through the media during the war. In the place of building bridges, walls have been built. It is, therefore, the sacred duty of communicators to demolish these walls and build the bridges of goodwill and harmony, which will go a long way in uniting people to usher in lasting global peace.''

Mr. Shekhawat called for de-linking poverty and violence through proactive global interventions in the interest of promoting global peace. Poverty and peace were closely linked, and as long as poverty existed, there could not be peace.

"It is, therefore, imperative to work with renewed commitment to secure for the people a world free from hunger, poverty, inequality, and exploitation.

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