Opinion - Letters to the Editor   

Caste and media

The article "Caste matters in the Indian media" (June 3) deserves praise for exposing the biased coverage of the quota issue by most of the mainstream media. They resorted to stereotype `polls,' which asked the people to just say `yes' or `no.' The quota issue is not a matter that can be decided by saying `yes' or `no.' The `polls' were in no way scientific as most of the underprivileged have access to neither mobile phones nor the Internet, which were necessary to participate in the `voting.'

K. Gagan,
Mysore

* * *

The article reflects the true feelings of many. Most of the electronic media seemed to portray the management stand on the issue.

Sensationalism has become a tool for the media to get more attention. In the process, the core issue gets distorted.

Geetha Raghupathi,
Chennai

* * *

In covering protests over the reservation issue, the media demonstrated their caste bias as never before. With the electronic media penetrating households, many a debate must have been generated around dining tables over the issue. But not all households have a dining table or television, particularly a vast majority of those who are impacted by reservation.

Jaya Iyer,
New Delhi

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The article is symptomatic of the malaise afflicting the media as a whole, which have turned elitist of late, and failed to articulate the problems of the people as a whole. Reservation is not the only issue whose coverage was one-sided. For years, the media have been ignoring the issues of rural development and agriculture.

Farmers' suicides hardly stir the media's conscience — the news is used as space fillers in some newspapers. But broad-based recruitment at the entry level is no solution. There is need to sensitise the higher echelons of the editorial hierarchy and bring back professionalism, which is on its way out.

M. Nagaraja Rao,
Bellary, Karnataka

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It is not just the media but bureaucratic departments, educational institutions, banks, and commercial establishments that suffer from caste bias. A disinterested survey will confirm the situation. Humiliation of the oppressed castes continues in many places in naked form, and in some places in a subtle form.

M. Govindaswamy,
Chennai

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The article highlights how a section of the media, especially the electronic media, manufactured the anti-reservation movement. While the pro- and anti-reservation movements during the Mandal times 16 years ago — the electronic media were not so active then — were to some extent spontaneous, the present movement is clearly the fallout of media influence. In the rapidly changing global context in which government jobs are shrinking fast, the forward castes are reconciled to the idea of reservation.

As in the case of SCs and STs, a national consensus in favour of reservation for the OBCs is emerging. But for the proactive visual media, the present agitation would not have started.

Y.L. Srinivas,
Hyderabad

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Whatever the objective behind the social survey of senior journalists ("Upper castes dominate national media, says survey in Delhi," June 5), it is only going to provoke politicians, always obsessed with quota and reservation, into attributing motives whenever they are rightly criticised for their failures.

T. Ramaswamy,
Chennai New IT forms The Finance Ministry's decision to replace the one-page Saral income tax form with a complex four-page 2F form for filing returns is disappointing. Saral was simple and easy to handle. It involved less paper work for the department too. At least the Government should allow taxpayers whose income is less than Rs.5 lakh a year to use Saral forms.

T.S. Gopalkrishnan,
Chennai

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It is obvious that the motive behind the introduction of the new form is to elicit detailed information from the assessees to harass them, and not to help them as claimed. Even a child knows filling up one page is much easier than four pages.

V. Sundaresan,
Chennai

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