Sensation and sympathy
By S Anand
Dalits can figure in contemporary media only under two conditions:
when they are pushed to doing something dramatic and spectacular (like
burning a bogey of the Deccan Queen to protest the Khairlanji
killings), or when a bleeding-heart publication carries a sad story on
"suffering" dalits. But daily atrocities against dalits and democratic
assertions of civil rights by dalits are not covered
May 21, 2002. Murugesan and Ramasamy, two dalits in Thiniyam village
in Tiruchirapalli district, Tamil Nadu, were branded with hot iron
rods and forced to feed each other human excreta by an OBC Thevar
family of the village. For weeks, the news was not properly reported
even in the Tamil media. There was no outrage in civil society except
in dalit circles. In June, the Dalit Panthers of India (known as
Viduthalai Chiruththaigal Katchi in Tamil) under the leadership of
Thirumavalavan staged a massive protest against the incident in the
district headquarters of Tiruchirapalli. Nearly 200,000 people
gathered. The local and national media remained indifferent.
Cut to September 2005. Actor and TV star Khushboo was being attacked
for her comments on how young women should have safe sex and how men
should not expect their wives to be virgin. These comments were
deliberately twisted by sections of the Tamil media to make Khushboo
appear 'anti-Tamil'. Tamizh Murasu, a forgotten eveninger that had
been recently acquired and re-launched by the Dayanidihi Maran-owned
Sun TV group (which then owed allegiance to the ruling party, Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam) noticed that Khushboo's as-told-to column in the
Tamil edition of India Today (in its annual 'sex issue' targeted at
sales and advertising revenue) had gone almost unnoticed for over a
week since it hit the stands on September 18. Tamizh Murasu was
looking for some sensational news that could boost its sales and
visibility. It chanced upon Khushboo's comments—a Gujarati Muslim who
had made Chennai her home, and someone who was hosting a show on the
rival Jaya TV. A soft target. Before running the story, the newspaper
sought the opinion of various Tamil cultural/ political/ film
personalities on what they interpreted as Khushboo's "disparaging
comments sullying all Tamil women". Many, including DPI's
Thirumavalavan, initially refused to comment, saying they were not
aware of Khushboo's remarks. Yet Tamizh Murasu ran the story with the
banner, 'Tamil women have no chastity, says Khushboo' on September 24,
2005, with indignation expressed by some nonentities from the film
industry. The Sun media group orchestrated a campaign around
Khushboo's comments. There were Tamizh Murasu posters across the state
and the Sun group used its television arm, the most-watched channel
Sun TV, to run short teasers on Khushboo's 'sensational' comments
exposed by Tamizh Murasu. The group's FM radio Suryan also encouraged
people to read the eveninger. The many arms of the Sun media empire
fed one big mouth.
In the next few days, several political parties were forced to react
and condemn Khushboo. Leaders of the BJP, Paattali Makkal Katchi,
Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and Dalit Panthers of India
aired their views about how Khushboo was "denigrating" Tamil women and
"encouraging women to be immoral". The DPI and PMK were especially
shrill since they had joined hands to launch the Tamil Protection
Movement earlier that year. Some DPI cadre, led by women, held street
protests with chappals and brooms, demanding that Khushboo apologise
or leave Tamil Nadu and "return to her Bombay". A Khushboo effigy was
made to ride a donkey.
Sine 1998-99, I had witnessed the rise of Dalit Panthers of India
(DPI) as a social movement that had once called for the boycott of
parliamentary politics, saying dalits had no future in such a system.
The DPI raised several issues related to the oppression of and state
brutalities against dalits in the late-1990s and later. For their
participation in agitational politics, many of its young cadres were
jailed both by the DMK and the AIADMK governments under the draconian
Goondas Act and National Security Act. Riding on a wave of protests,
especially after a dalit-inclusive Third Front was forged with the
late G K Moopanar of Tamil Maanila Congress in 1999, Thirumavalavan
gave in to the temptation of electoral politics and contested the
September 1999 Lok Sabha elections from Chidambaram (reserved)
constituency. Large-scale violence was witnessed. The PMK and DMK
unleashed organised terror on dalits and prevented them from voting;
dalit houses were burnt in several villages. The state police,
however, arrested scores of DPI cadre. As a People's Watch report then
noted, "the state DGP was trying to portray the DPI as a 'terrorist'
organisation". Yet, Thirumavalavan secured 2,25,768 of the 7,24,305
valid votes polled. The media and civil society were not perturbed.
For many of them, the militant assertion of civil rights by the DPI
was only an expression of 'terror'—not the injustices perpetrated on
dalits by society or the state. The DPI was demonised by the media and
civil society as a disruptive, antisocial force.
However, the same media actively solicited DPI and Thirumavalavan and
incited them to speak out and act against Khushboo and her ostensible
attack on Tamils. When 40 to 50 DPI cadre demonstrated before and for
television cameras demanding that Khushboo apologise or go back to
Bombay, the national media got very interested. Over 200,000 people
demonstrating peacefully against the dehumanisation of dalits in
Thinniyam did not count for the media. The force-feeding of human shit
to dalits itself did not make for news. However, a few DPI cadre
wielding brooms on a Khushboo effigy mounted on a donkey makes for a
suitable portrayal of dalits. This is the image of dalits as barbaric,
as a community that is anti-modern and opposed to civil expression,
that suits the media.
Since May 2001, as a correspondent of Outlook magazine, I had sought
to report on the significant interventions the DPI had made on a range
of issues: when the DPI had battled the state and a feudal society to
ensure elections in the reserved panchayats of Keeripatti and
Pappapatti in Madurai district where Thevars had repeatedly opposed
the very idea of dalits heading the civic bodies; when the Thinniyam
incident had happened; when over 400 dalit homes were attacked by the
state police in collusion with local Thevars in November 2001 in
Sankaralingapuram, Tuticorin district; when on December 6, 2002,
Thirumavalavan staged a unique protest against J Jayalalitha's
anti-conversion legislation in a ceremony where thousands of Dalit
Panther cadre and other secular Tamils shed their Sanskrit-inflected
Hindu-sounding names and assumed secular 'pure Tamil' ones.
Outlook, representative of mainstream print journalism at its liberal
best, never deemed it necessary to allow space for reportage of such
'caste issues'. The magazine's readers were ostensibly not interested
in the struggles of dalits at the grassroots level. The first and only
opportunity I got to write about the DPI and Thirumavalavan in Outlook
was when they had been pitchforked to national attention thanks to
their anti-Khushboo demonstrations.
There's no question of defending the odious position that
Thirumavalavan and his party cadre were manipulated into taking by the
media over Khushboo. That some foolery, a show of chappals and brooms,
ensured space on prime-time national television, made the dalit cadre
offer repeat performances for the sake of the camera. They came to
relish their 15 seconds on television. Several times in Chennai, such
protests came to be staged specifically for the media. The same
cameras would not travel to Thinniyam to record what was perhaps one
of post-independence India's most dehumanising acts.
Elite media like Outlook and NDTV took an active interest since their
constituency – the liberal, secular middle classes – saw the attack on
Khushboo as an attack on themselves. New forums to protect freedom of
expression were launched in Chennai. Civil society actors who had been
routinely indifferent to atrocities against dalits and the DPI's
activism on this front were quick to condemn the DPI without
considering how the party and its cadre had been manipulated into
posturing on this non-issue.
Such a script was repeated in the case of Khairlanji in Maharashtra's
Bhandara district, where month-long dalit-led protests against the
rape and lynching of the Bhotmange family in October and mid-November
2006 were ignored by the media. However, when agitating dalits in
Mumbai burnt two emptied bogies of the Pune-Mumbai Deccan Queen and a
local train on November 30, 2006, to draw attention to Khairlanji and
to the desecration of an Ambedkar statue in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, the
corporate media began to take notice. Whatever the context, we see
that democratic assertions of civil rights by dalits are not given
attention; whereas a desperate recourse to violence and sensationalism
are magnified and condemned as typical of dalits.
Why does this happen? Routine atrocities against dalits – that two
dalits are murdered in India every day according to official records –
cannot be commodified by the media: be it local Tamil newspapers like
Tamizh Murasu or channels like Sun TV, or by more elite media like
Outlook or CNN-IBN. Whereas when the media sets the stage for a
conflict over Khushboo, they can create a constituency for such news.
Dalits can figure in contemporary media under two conditions: when
they are pushed to do something dramatic and spectacular (a show of
brooms against Khushboo, or burning a bogey of the Deccan Queen), or
when a section of the media that passes for the conscientious (the odd
bleeding-heart liberal newspaper/channel) seeks to shower 'sympathy'
on dalits who are 'suffering' (like when a BBC television reporter
tells us, "because of their extreme poverty, rat is often the only
form of protein the Musahars get to eat", as he munches on a burnt rat
leg, something an Indian reporter is unlikely to do).
Sympathy-driven journalism, bereft of a deeper political and social
understanding of caste dynamics, wins awards for reporting the
unreported world, the invisible India. Sensation-seeking journalism,
driven by commodification of the spectacle, brings in advertisements,
revenue. The dalits are crushed between these two.
(S Anand has worked with The Hindu, Outlook and Tehelka. He runs
Navayana, a publishing house that exclusively focuses on the issue of
caste from an anti-caste perspective)
InfoChange News & Features, February 2009
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