Raging Waters And A Blind Media
By S Gautham
22 September,
2008
Countercurrents.org
When the commercials for all manner of luxury lifestyles were being aired just before the main news bulletin on Sunday Night, the slugs at the bottom of the screen informed us that there were two major headline grabbing stories. One early guesstimate was that a quarter of a million people had been rendered homeless by a furious Mahanadi, unshackled by the wise and efficient managers of the Hirakud Reservoir. This was done by the simple expedient of opening the sluice gates. All their belongings were now floating in irredeemable debris as the waters raced to find their way into the Bay of Bengal. This just adds to the millions displaced by the Kosi, not too far north, again the result of yet another angry river, dismissing with the utter contempt that nature reserves for human folly, the man-made restraint of an ageing embankment. This is a reminder that is served to us every year, but public memory is short. The bigger tragedy is that media memory is even shorter.
There was also an announcement from the Delhi police the same evening. Just a day earlier, three young men with Muslim names, had been arrested, in an encounter for alleged involvement in the Delhi blasts last week. They had confessed claimed the Delhi Police. There are no prizes for guessing which story lead the bulletin.
Several concerned citizens have already raised questions about the way in which the "encounter" which led to the arrests of the young Muslim men, had been conducted. Everyone knows the pathetic record of the police in convincing the courts about the veracity of the confessions it routinely extracts, especially from young Muslim men.
But none of this caught any attention in the news broadcasts. Few questions on police procedure were asked. The media seems to suffer from complete amnesia in such cases, and seem to swallow the official line, completely and with ease. The encounter itself had not only killed an alleged terrorist, but also consumed a senior policeman, who was presented to us as something of a hero, for being an encounter specialist. There was substantial coverage of the human tragedy involving the policeman's family and surprisingly little on the families on the other side.
I raise this to draw attention to how the media shapes the public discourse in urban India. I wonder if the floods would have made it to the headlines if the numbers were not this staggering. The Indian Express had a full page spread in its Sunday Magazine, (one is told that the weekend editions go to print days in advance) less than two days after the encounter; they had dispatched a correspondent and a photographer to distant Azamgarh, from where they claimed, each one of the accused hailed. The story was able to trace an arc from Azamgarh's involvement in making a local country revolver, the katta, to gaining control of the Bombay underworld, to now being the nursery of home-grown terror. Luckily, the favourite whipping boy, the foreign hand did not raise its meddlesome digits, as the people in Islamabad were coming to terms with their own blast in a posh 5 star hotel.
I am not diminishing the importance of the blasts or what they do to innocent citizens of our crowded cities. These are events of unspeakable horror and they must be reported. But we have to also realize that the "glamour" of unexpected terror eclipses the far more appalling, and avoidable because they are expected, tragedies that affect the great unwashed in the rural hinterland. The Media, and the Event, have together deflected attention away from these disasters, by pushing them to second place, and adorning them with self-righteous homilies and perfunctory attention. The questions that need to be asked then remain unasked.
To be fair, there were Special Reports of the floods in Bihar. One reporter on a mainstream channel appeared committed and heroic, and she tried to chase a couple of leads with some energy. One of them was a compelling and deeply disturbing narrative of a young child, all broken with rashes, her poor, confused parents unable to get any kind of attention. The reporter found a paramedic, whose diagnosis was swift and immediate – "chicken pox", he said grimly, before warning that there was a risk of exposure because it was a viral infection.
When she returned the next morning, the reporter found the family missing. After a long search, she and her crew finally found them; they were walking down a road, with several others rendered homeless, two hours away from the camp where she found them first. They tell her that they were given some medicine and asked to leave the camp. One is forced to make the connection that this family was sacrificed, without explanation, ostensibly to keep the infection away. This is no different from sacking someone because they are HIV positive. This is structural apartheid at its very shameful extreme. It brought back memories of Dalit survivors being denied access to relief camps on the Tamil Nadu coast in the aftermath of the tsunami in 2004. The good reporter races back to the camp, to interview the relief workers, to ask them why? They simply denied all knowledge and when she returned to look for the family, they were gone for good.
The mainstream media, despite the enthusiasm of its young foot soldiers in the field, has constantly failed to raise the bar on the analyses of such event. Television news is especially guilty of trivializing the debate. It displays a chimerical concern, effortlessly occupying for itself a moral high ground, and ends up shrilly hectoring the ills of a flawed system. All this, no doubt gladdens the heart of their urbane audiences who buy the advertised products and end up paying everyone's salary. They now know whom to blame for the ills of this country, and can return guilt-free to their pampered dinner tables. The stories are therefore not pursued, and the coverage is cavalier; but a certificate of social engagement and responsibility is earned.
In Orissa this year for instance, the environmentalist and expert on the damage that dams can cause, Himanshu Thakkar, has estimated that at least a third of the water flowing in the Mahanadi has been released from the Hirakud Reservoir. There would have been no disaster he says, if the waters had not been released when the downstream areas were experiencing so much rainfall. It is quite a conundrum this one, because they were forced to release the water since the level was already very high. The water levels were high because the reservoir was mismanaged in the first place.
For example, on August 1, the recommended water level at Hirakud dam was 590 feet, but the actual level on that date was already way high at 607.5 feet. In less than a fortnight, it had reached 618.5 feet, against the recommended level of 606 feet. On September 10, the water level was 627 feet, just 3 feet below capacity. Thakkar says the Hirakud dam is one of the few dams of the country, with an in-built flood control cushion. The idea is that the flood cushion portion of the storage should not be filled right till the end of the monsoon, which is in the first week of October. By filling up the reservoir to full capacity before the end of monsoon, the dam operators have destroyed the flood control role of the Hirakud dam and unleashed an avoidable disaster on the vulnerable people of Orissa. Thakkar's thesis is that this is a culpable crime. Much of the mainstream media did refer to the release of the water, but few bothered to ask the reasons why. Thakkar's findings come to us by the unfettered grace of the World Wide Web.
How much investigation or editorial judgment does it take to remind viewers that "natural calamities" become disasters, for wholly man made reasons? That while it may be possible to do little about excessive rain, there is much that can be done to manage water on the ground? How much evidence or demographic data do channel bosses require before they can comprehend and inform their viewers, that these "natural" events are anything but natural in their selection of victims? That it is the existing social structure which determines who pays the higher price? In its refusal to keep asking the right questions with a pugnacious persistence, in its blind unwillingness to repeatedly keep flagging the violence perpetrated by the system, by its ineptitude, by its vulgar inability to acknowledge the truth, the corporate media merely fulfils its essential function: which is to teach us what to think about these issues by painting flimsy shrouds of veneer over naked, grim realities, earning in the process the moniker of being watchdogs of democracy.
This masking of the truth is perhaps their real intention. Maybe one should not really be surprised. Or shocked.
(S
Gautham is a researcher and producer of documentary films
based in New Delhi. He has been a Scholar of Peace Fellow, with WISCOMP,
working on the gendered impact of the tsunami. He can be contacted
at [email protected])
