Death Penalty: Night Editors
Word Of CautionBy Jawed Naqvi
25 November, 2006
Combat LawJournalism is not about Marxism as such but there is an old Marxist precept that all young reporters were once taught to respect regardless of their editor’s ideological preferences. “Doubt everything.” This was what Karl Marx had told an American journalist who asked him to spell out his life’s motto. It was in a similar spirit that cub reporters were encouraged to balance the official story in a police case, for example, with the cautionary words “alleged”, “suspected”, “claimed to be” and so on. In other words, the police version of an incident was deemed potentially one-sided, if not outright suspect, in the eyes of the concerned beat reporter. And it was usually left to the courts to divine the truth, to the extent any court can, and that was the end of the story. It is another matter of course that the principle of doubt should also apply with equal force to the perceived errors of omission and commission by the judiciary too.
Professor Nirmalangshu Mukherjee of the philosophy department in Delhi University, in his book about the attack on India’s British-built parliament House and the ensuing mistrial of the accused has identified dozens of examples where irresponsible, often motivated, reporting became the bane of four or five Kashmiri Muslims and their families after they were named in the case. The reporters not only did not question the police account in the parliament story but actually helped fuel the myth that each one of the accused was a terrorist or an accomplice in the crime. It was thus that MohammedAfzal Guru was forced to “confess” to his alleged crime before themedia while in police custody. That the superior courts eventually threw out the so-called TV scoop as legally untenable was an important correction, but it came too late to be of much use for those whose lives were blackened by the reporters’ tar brush.
Sometimes though a few well meaning journalists do however feel nudged by their conscience and they do on occasions show respect to the original tenets of their profession. And when they do kindle the questioning spirit of yore the results are invariably positive. Recently, when the police in Mysore claimed to have foiled a terror plot with the arrest of two suspected Pakistanis in an encounter, one or two newspapers also ran a small story alongside in which the landlady of one of the accused was quoted as questioning the police version.
In these times of communal innuendo it must be stressed that the landlady is/was a Hindu. According to her account, the alleged Pakistani terrorists were picked up a fortnight ago by plainclothes policemen from her house. So who is telling the truth? The police case is obviously suspect and they have to try very hard to prove that the men were arrested on that very morning.
The Indian Express also reported recently that the vice chancellor of Kashmir University in Srinagar found himself questioning the police account concerning the Delhi blasts during last year’s Diwali. In a challenge to the official theory, the vice chancellor was quoted as stating officially that the key accused was present in the college on the day the crime was supposed to have been committed at three or fourvulnerable busy places in faraway Delhi.
Likewise with the Mumbai trains blasts. The police chief there was allowed by the media to get away with the story that the culprits in the July terror attack on packed trains had all been arrested. It was claimed that the case was all nicely sewn up and the accused had owned up to their crime. They too were linked to Pakistan. The prime minister, the foreign secretary and practically everyone was thus misled into believing that the Mumbai police commissioner had done the impossible. He had the case thoroughly worked out, leaving no room forany doubt whatsoever. But then seven of the accused, still in police custody and therefore prone to coercion, issued a statement that theyhad not made any such confession to the police or to anyone else.
One of the consequences of having an increasingly unquestioning and occasionally prejudiced media is that it begins to provide succour to Rightwing forces. That’s how a petty traders’ campaign against alleged government atrocities in Delhi was able to communalise the platform,thus handling direct benefit to the Bharatiya Janata Party. “Afzal ko azadi, vyapariyon ko phaansi.” (Free Mohammed Afzal Guru from his death sentence and hang the traders) The campaigners mocked the Congress government. Of course, an even more intricate link exists between the media and the diplomacy. We may frown at embedded American journalists in Iraq, but we hardly have a leg to stand on when we consider our own culpability.
Under the circumstances, one of the remarkable things about Indian diplomacy is that a key strategist in the complex of skein of the country’s anti-terror engagements with Pakistan is a former police officer. It must have been really tough for the foreign ministry cadre, often seen as government ‘brahmins,’ to accept it when MK Narayanan, the former head of the Intelligence Bureau, was named to succeed former diplomat JN Dixit when he died in harness as national security advisor. It was good that the critique of the Mumbai police commissioner’s overreaching explanation for the Mumbai blasts came from Narayanan. And what did Narayanan say, which others could not, would not?
He said in an interview that there was “no clinching evidence” in the Mumbai case although there were strong circumstantial suggestions that the police version was not entirely untenable. Such forthrightness could not be expected of anyone other than a police officer, the only ones who are familiar with the filibuster that usually accompanies high profile crime cases. India’s case against Pakistan on the terror issue will be watched closely for the credibility, not so much for the role the diplomats would play, but by the standards set by people like Narayanan for a transparent dialogue. This is what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said he wants out of the anti-terror joint mechanism. Unfortunately words of caution like ‘alleged’, ‘suspected’ and so on seem to have gone out of fashion within the media, even more so since the world embarked on the American-led war on terrorism. Now only Pakistani terrorists are arrested not alleged Pakistani terrorists.
The tendency to ply the police version has landed both the media and the judiciary in quite a soup in recent months.The three most outstanding examples have come from the media itself. The cases of Jessica Lal, Priyadarshini Mattoo, and Nitish Katara have found the media rowing back from their initial culpability in colluding with wayward police accounts. The conviction of Mattoo’s killer has shown that the judiciary is willing to apply corrections when the people’s sense of justice is outraged.
The flip side of unquestioning reporting shows grim possibilities for the nation and its citizens. It was after all a major element in the nuclear sabre-rattling that lasted an entire year between India and Pakistan after the parliament attack.
As they prepare to meet later this month to discuss a potentially purposeful anti-terror mechanism, it would be useful for the Indian and pakistani foreign secretaries and their teammates to keep away from the pitfalls of hasty conclusions, a normal risk when the night editor’s word of advice is ignored.
The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist
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