Page 102 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

Gujarat 2002 and the Indian news media 91
As Herman and Chomsky observed, flak is often used by political elites to
discipline the media:

It (flak) may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits,
and other modes of complaint, threat, and punitive action. It may be organized
centrally or locally, or it may consist of the entirely independent actions of
individuals. If flak is produced on a large scale, or by individuals or groups
with substantial resources, it can be both uncomfortable and costly to the
media...If certain kinds of fact, position, or program are thought likely to
elicit flak, this prospect can be a deterrent.
(Herman and Chomsky 1988: 26)

The BJP was in power in Gujarat and New Delhi during the clashes. After the
initial days of violence, when the coverage of the attacks against Muslims started
reflecting badly on the BJP governments, its leaders came down heavily on jour-
nalists. A day after Prime Minister Vajpayee’s televised address to the nation on
3 March, regretting the ‘disgraceful’ violence in Gujarat, he told a group of
concerned citizens that the news media were presenting ‘exaggerated’accounts of
the situation (The Times of India 2002a).
The BJP and the Gujarat government singled out STAR News and banned
cable operators from showing it in the state. Soon, viewers in Ahmedabad – the
state capital and the scene of some of the worst violence – were met with blank
television screens. Other channels were also banned, including two local channels
in Surat, MY TV and Channel Surat. In Rajkot, the police banned the publication
of special supplements of three Gujarati dailies. Cable operators received calls
from local officials in Ahmedabad and elsewhere to black out STAR News, Zee
News, CNN and Aaj Tak (The Times of India 2002b). Dossiers and ‘hitlists’ on
journalists were reportedly prepared while ‘those channels and newspapers who
are critical of the chief minister are not invited to his press conferences and
denied the basic right to information by the state apparatus’ (Sardesai 2004).
The main complaint of the BJP and its allies was that the news media did not crit-
icize those responsible for the Godhra train tragedy in which ‘kar sevaks’ were the
victims. This, however, was less than true because every channel and newspaper had
covered the Godhra tragedy extensively, but follow-ups on subsequent days were
overtaken by the Union Budget on 28 February and the retaliation unleashed on
Muslims in Ahmedabad and other parts of Gujarat. Another complaint was that the
news media ‘inflamed communal passions’ by providing graphic television cover-
age of the events. Journalists and others critical of the attacks against Muslims
countered this by saying that the level of violence would have been much worse if
the news media had not sounded the alarm through their graphic coverage.
The BJP and its allies also used the technique of branding to discipline the media.
Journalists who criticized the attacks on Muslims were dubbed as the ‘Marxist-
Mullah combine’ and the ‘secular Taliban’. A group of angry Hindutva supporters
told members of the Editors Guild of India who visited Gujarat to inquire into the
media side of the events that news channels and the English-language national press