Media, Nitish and Forbesganj mayhem
By Asad
http://www.okhlatimes.com/
Governments all over the world use different methods to muzzle freedom of press. The most common way is to bribe media houses by giving them advertisements. Other popular methods practiced to silence the press are: co-opt the media or embed senior journalists. And if all these don’t work then kill them as it happened to Syed Saleem Shahzad in Pakistan and Jyotirmoy Dey in India’s financial capital Mumbai. In India, cases like Dey are rare. Still several state governments have adopted subtle ways to tame the free media. Among them the Nitish Kumar government of Bihar has mastered the art of keeping the local and national media quiet by offering them government largesse.
It has worked well for him, as nobody in the mainstream media, including print and electronic in Patna and Delhi, gave a prominent coverage to a June 3 incident of police firing to silence unarmed protesters of Forbesganj, a sub-division of Araria district, about 350 kilometer from state capital Patna. The story was relegated to the middle pages. For some publishing houses the report was of no importance as more important events were unfolding in Delhi vis-a-vis Anna Hazare and yoga guru Baba Ramdev. US-based Twocircles.net continuously highlighted the plight of the people by running stories. Also, Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association (JTSA) with other groups demonstrated at Bihar Bhawan against the police brutality. The London-based Council of Indian Muslims (CIM) issued a press release seeking action against the police officials and compensation for the victims.
Many people, including some senior journalists in Delhi, living far from the boondocks of India, came to know about the ghastly even only through websites that picked the footage from some regional TV channels and circulated it.
The video footage that has gone viral on the Internet shows some policemen jumping on the face and chest of a fallen man hit by bullets, who later on died in the hospital. As if that was not enough, the monsters were even heard gloating over their job and said: “Ho gaya, ho gaya, badla lya ja chukka” (It’s all done. Revenge has been taken). In the police firing some four persons were killed and many injured including 25 policemen, according to a PTI report. But some social activists who visited the hot spot contradicted this official version, claiming that the provocation was one sided and some six villagers, including a pregnant woman and a six-month-old baby, died in the police firing.
Since becoming Chief Minister of Bihar after defeating the Yadav clan on November 24, 2005, the engineer-turn-politician has successfully managed social and media engineering in the impoverished state. In the last year itself, the JDU headed government in Bihar that never fails to tom-tom about its good governance forked out Rs 28.47 crore on advertisements to the media, according to a riveting write-up in Bihar Times.
In the last six years, the soft-spoken CM, who keeps media persons at arm’s length, has showered tonnes of money on the media-houses in the name of advertisements. Care is taken to satisfy the insatiable appetite of big media houses, including newspapers and electronic channels.
An RTI activist, Purander Sawaran, found out to his dismay that the exorbitant amounts were gifted to the fourth estate between September and November 2010. Some Rs 10,12,13,999 was taken by one Hindi newspaper, Dainik Hindustan. Even not so circulated Urdu dailies, whose journalistic skills are doubted and pay peanuts to their employees, have their share of pie too. Urdu daily Quami Tanzeem got advertisement worth about Rs one crore. The Times of India and Economic Times got Rs 1,13,52,332. Hindustan Times bagged Rs 58,63,454 advertisement. The list is long.
Banking on government advertisement for survival is nothing new for the media. But what has shocked people all over the country is the criminal silence maintained by the big media houses in highlighting the plight of the innocent people who were at the receiving end of the police force when they had turned up to block a road to protest against an upcoming factory nearby.
The intrepid reporters, who never used to miss an opportunity to even highlight pick-pocketing cases in Patna during the Lalu-Rabri regime as deteriorating law and order issue, turned a blind eye to this human rights violation by the police force.
The lust for revenue has blunted journalists’ skills. Other than this the media houses that are mostly dominated by upper castes fear that exposing Kumar’s misrule would help Lalu to gain ground in the state. Also, they are concerned about their power slipping away that they retained after some 15 years of power struggle with the Yadavs.
Whatever the reason, the media insensitivity to this barbaric incident will only dent its credibility further. Like politicians, many people will start suspecting media’s role of a serious player in bringing changes in society.