Badaun Rape/Murder: Failure of Media (and Urban Civil Society) Our collective response highlights biases, selfishness and insensitivities of urban, educated, english-speaking, middle/upper-middle class India that dominates the media, police, bureaucracy, political parties and civil society organisations... No Nirbhaya, No Damini, No braveheart... no giving identities, no deciding against calling them victims, no personal details (of course, without revealing the identities) to make the two girls human, give them a face rather than reducing them to a number, a statistic... What an irony... Wall Street Journal reports that They both wanted to be doctors. Remember how the media talked about the aspirations of a physiotherapy student were dashed in the Delhi Gangrape case. No serious report/analysis on why Badaun did not get outrage the middle class and contrast with responses to Delhi Gangrape case. Who are the culprits? Where do they live? What about their families? Their socio-economic status, political affiliations (they were yadavs), etc. Remember, the slum visits in Delhi to track down the families/neighbours of Delhi gangrape convicts... More lazy press-conference/press release based reporting on political squabbles over the rape/murder, instead of some serious, meticulous field reporting. The accused belonged to Yadav caste. What about the girls? Why couldnt the reporters get their caste right by asking the basic question in a case relating to caste/gender violence, instead of lazily calling them dalit sisters? Even when the government said they do not belong to SC/ST caste and therefore cant slap charges under the stringent SC/ST Atrocities Act. Government sources said the two girls belonged to the backward Shakya caste. (Wiki entry says, Sakhya is a suryavanshi kshatriya clan, the caste to which Buddha belonged before renunciation... The Kachhi/shakya are a community of peasant farmers, involved in the cultivation of vegetables. The Kachhi have their own caste association, the Akhil Bharitya Shakya Chatriya Mahasabha. About 90% of the Kachhi are Hindu, while the other 10% are Buddhist... As of 1991, they were designated an Other Backward Class in the Indian system of positive discrimination.). It took the Wall Street Journal to tell that the older girl’s father, a spearmint farmer. What is the socio-economic profile of the girls families? Labourers, small farmers, etc? How many siblings? Their safety and security? Were the dalit girls literate, did they go to school? There were so many silly arm-chair punditry, raves and rants against Badaun rape/murder, most of it was not based on facts (and there were no facts reported from the field by reporters). I have half a dozen ghastly examples of opinion pieces written mechanically - without facts, without understanding of the ground reality, without basic research, without academic insight into caste/gender violence, and what not. The ghastly incident took place in a village - Katara Sadatganj - which is in Badaun district. WSJ says, it is located about 180 miles southeast of Delhi. When you search for the village Katara Sadatganj on google, it finds mention only in news reports about Mayawatis visit. (I spent hours going through newspaper reports on Badaun across publications... If I had the time and access I would have scanned through the Hindi media to see how it fared in its reportage... Somebody should do that. It could throw up some surprises. About TV, the less said the better. A Srinivasan Jain Truth/Hype could do some justice...)
Posted on: Thu, 05 Jun 2014 04:42:15 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015