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Causes, concerns and custom

"Is the plight of Dalits not considered newsworthy or profitable enough?" asks reader Ravi George Mathew of Chennai. He continues: "This newspaper has a proud heritage of exposing caste violence and oppression. This lopsided news coverage is extremely disappointing and mirrors the general press attitude towards Dalit issues."

Mathew is not alone in this perception. The media's failure on this count is a recurring theme in many letters to the editor on this issue. "Several incidents of crude repression take place all over the country and do not find a mention in the mainstream media." "The media should not downplay such barbaric incidents." "It should have made it to the front pages. Only the media can help readers and viewers become aware of brutal incidents taking place in the name of caste," say several readers.

The anguish over non-coverage by the media in general was provoked by the way they dealt with the brutal killing of four members of a Dalit family in Khairlanji village in Bhandara district, near Nagpur in Maharashtra. Accounts of the attack vary in details. A mother and her daughter and two sons were set upon by a group, paraded naked and hacked to death. The father escaped as he was not in the house. The allegation of rape of the two women is not corroborated by the police, who have been found wanting, or the two post mortem reports, which have been questioned. Various causes are cited for the attack: a land dispute, a sequel to an earlier clash, resentment over the Dalit family's assertive stance, and so on.

The charge of media indifference gets substantiated when the treatment of this incident is studied. The attack took place on September 29. The first report appeared (in the English press) in a Nagpur daily on October 3, with a heading "4 of family murdered." The reason was said to be "an illicit affair." There was no mention that it was a Dalit family. A Mumbai paper gave a brief account of the happenings on October 7. A national TV news channel picked up the story only on November 1.

I had earlier mentioned proximity as a major factor influencing news selection. Khairlanji is over 700 km away from Mumbai and much more distant from Delhi, and so out of range and interest for the TV channels. And when an event draws their attention, it gets reflected in the print media. It took violent protests in Nagpur on November 6 for Khairlanji to come to national notice. That was when it got first mention in The Hindu — a bare report on the demonstrations, with no background. The reader had to wait another day for this, when a Mumbai report on protesters entering Mantralaya, the State secretariat, explained the whys. It was another ten days when the paper had a spot account from the affected village. Subsequently, it published a series of articles by Meena Menon on Khairlanji and also a leader.

There are more questions that await answers: What ignited the protests after a month? Were naxalites involved, as the Deputy Chief Minister, R.R. Patil, felt? Was there police collusion or inaction, as was alleged? (Some policemen have been suspended.)

The issue of reservations hogs media space; for Dalits there are more fundamental questions — social, economic and empowerment, which cause simmering tensions and trigger attacks, but these do not attract as much media attention as they deserve.

Ramani P. Easwaran of Bangalore is judgmental. To him, The Hindu's "claim that it is objective, fair and committed to journalistic ethics ... sounds hollow" when it does not report the Chinese Ambassador's assertion that Arunachal Pradesh is part of China, made in a TV interview. He anticipates my argument that it is a question of editorial judgment and pronounces mine to be a "rubberstamp role."

The envoy's statement was reported by most newspapers and featured by some. The Hindu did not. It was a conscious editorial judgment, ("clouded by ideology" according to Easwaran) because it was not a new claim, I was told. It had been China's stand all along that it does not recognise the McMahon Line, and its maps show Arunachal Pradesh within its borders. But when External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee reacted to the envoy's comment by reiterating India's stand, The Hindu reported it in a one-para brief on Page 1 with related reports inside. The reader should have been told the context in which the remarks were made and educated on the background, which is a newspaper's role. That had to wait for some more days for Pallavi Aiyar's informative analysis on the editorial page.

Mr. Easwaran had an obiter dictum: "You should convey to the management the readers' opinions and urge them to change according to the readers' taste ... your role is more to publish the errors and corrections that appear everyday." That daily effort is the visible part of my labours. What I do with readers' views is not, and cannot be, in the public view or hearing. They reach those whom they should reach. But ensuring or enforcing change — that is not my task!

Come a leader's birthday, and the next day there is some reader asking why the paper did not carry anything about him or her that day. The latest instance was Jawaharlal Nehru's birthday on November 14. Gopa Kumar S. of Thiruvananthapuram was disheartened to find no article on Nehru that day, while half a page was devoted to Pierre Trudeau. Prof. P. Tauro of Mangalore finds "misplaced or changed" priorities when there is no mention of Nehru's birthday, children's day or International Children's Day (November 19). Every newspaper has its own way of dealing with such events. The Hindu does not have the custom of remembering leaders in such fashion, Gandhiji being the exception. When the occasion suggests it, there are features or special articles. The Trudeau piece was topical, on a new book on the Canadian leader.

readerseditor@thehindu.co.in

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