Page 98 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

Gujarat 2002 and the Indian news media 87
to Muslims worth millions of rupees was destroyed while the police and the state
administration controlled by the BJP were accused of passivity, if not complicity.
Sustained adverse coverage of the Gujarat’s government’s role in handling
the violence played a major role in the federal government intervening to bring
the violence to an end. The federal government, even while being critical of the
coverage, acted and put pressure on the local government, particularly when India
started getting bad press in the international news media.
It is important to note that since the Hindu–Muslim violence accompanying the
partition of India in 1947, other incidents of political violence on such a scale have
taken place. The BJP and the Hindutva forces have not been the only ones practising
such politics. The Congress party, which was in power in New Delhi in 1984, resorted
to similar principles and actions when Sikh guards assassinated Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi. The incident led to targeted attacks against the Sikh community in New Delhi
and other parts of north India as revenge for the killing of Indira Gandhi. Congress
Party leaders and workers were allegedly armed with voters’ lists to identify the
location of Sikhs, who were attacked almost all over India, but mainly in the northern
states. After the Babri mosque was demolished in 1992, Hindu and Muslim groups
clashed in Mumbai and elsewhere, resulting in a large number of deaths across India.
During every such episode of mass killings, the role of the state has come in
for much criticism. The state is seen as complicit in such acts of mass political
violence. As Varshney observed,

(No) amount of critique since 1947 has yet brought about durable changes in
the behaviour of the state on Hindu–Muslim relations. Even if Narendra
Modi, Gujarat’s Chief Minister at the time of the communal violence...were
to fall tomorrow, the bigger questions of Indian politics on Hindu–Muslims
relations would remain.
(2002: xi; emphasis in original)

Over the years, despite several inquiries, most of the perpetrators of the gory
events of 1984, 1992 and 2002 have remained unpunished.
If the political violence in Gujarat in 2002 and its aftermath signified dubious
‘continuity’ with earlier episodes, a notable ‘change’ was the way in which the
news media covered the events. For the first time, due to the proliferation of
satellite television since the early 1990s, and the bold and independent coverage
of Gujarat 2002, the news media emerged as prominent players in the political
discourse. As Rajagopal (2001) observed, since the mid-1980s, when
Doordarshan, the state-owned television network, telecast serials based on the
ancient religious texts of Ramayana and Mahabharata, television had reshaped the
context in which Indian politics was ‘conceived, enacted and understood’.
The next section examines the coverage of Gujarat 2002 primarily through four
lenses:

● the breakdown of long-held ethical norms in Indian journalism about not
identifying victims and attackers by religion;
● the use of flak by the Hindutva forces to discipline the media;