Struggles for survival and violence against women: the role of the media

Journalists have covered many different kinds of struggles in India — for livelihood, to save the environment, for tribal rights, for self-determination, etc. They have had to tread a difficult path while reporting, on the one hand, crackdowns by the government on such struggles; and, on the other hand, violence by the ‘other’ side — by militant and extremist groups. How does one report without tilting to either side? Is there really a ‘balanced’ way to report? What about the gender dimension? Women often bear the burden of this kind of violence. Does it reflect in our reporting?

This was the focus of the opening session of our national meet because conflict in India now has to be reported not just in places like Kashmir or the North East but in so many more parts of the country. NWMI members shared their experiences of reporting on mass movements/ struggles and the violence faced by women during conflicts from both sides. This was the first session of our two-day meeting and set the tone for the immense diversity of experiences and challenges experienced by journalists from across India.

The session itself examined how journalists cover a wide range of struggles and issues in India – tribal rights, SEZ issues, self-determination, violence and livelihood, etc. It examined whether and how journalists maintain a balance in reporting these issues and in bringing to the fore the gender dimension in their reportage as well as in focusing on how women bear the brunt of the violence.

The session was moderated by Laxmi Murthy. Speakers included Chitra Ahanthem, resident editor with Imphal Free Press in Manipur, who spoke of the perils of covering the North East and the problems faced by women journalists there; Dilnaz Boga (now based in Mumbai) who has covered the conflict over self-determination in Jammu and Kashmir and the plight of women and children; C Vanaja, journalist and film-maker from Hyderabad, who spoke of three aspects of the issue of violence and displacement in Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, and Freny Manecksha, freelance journalist based in Mumbai, who gave her insights into reportage of issues in Chhattisgarh and Orissa.

Chitra Ahanthem began by contesting the notion of the ‘North East’. “It is just a geographical concept,” she said. The tribes, culture, problems and politics, as well as the level of militarisation differ from state to state in the North East, she said. She preferred confining herself to talking only about Manipur. According to her, the national media operates on the basic premise that Manipuri women are empowered and that premise needs to be challenged. She felt this was a glorified image which gets relayed every time journalists from outside come to Manipur for a short time and see women running the market, etc. This leads to the stereotype of the liberated NE woman, which is not the reality.

She said that the intense presence of security forces has a huge impact on everyday life in society. With everything shutting down by 5 pm, women find it difficult to move out and often several women journalists who got married have simply had to drop out because they find society unresponsive and unhelpful. At the same time, women are not given serious beats or taken seriously as journalists. If there is a press conference called by militants, no woman journalist is sent for it. Women are also not put in positions where they can shape opinion; analysis and comment are left to male journalists alone. This itself shows that Manipur is as patriarchal as the rest of India, she said. She is resident editor of Imphal Free Press but she is still called ‘Sir’ as people cannot comprehend that a woman can be an editor!

Moving on to the media’s coverage of violence against women, Chitra recalled the gruesome rape and killing of Manorama in 2004 by security men. “We live in what’s seen as a fringe area,” she said. “Hence it hardly got the kind of coverage the Delhi rape did. Now because Justice Verma has spoken about it, the widespread sexual abuse that takes place under AFSPA is coming into the open.” On the one hand, the media largely ignores the violence against women in the NE from all sides; on the other, the manner in which it reports such violence is problematic. The question is always asked: Who was the woman? If she was from the NE, it is assumed that she was ‘easy’ and was therefore raped. Why does the media go into factors such as what time the rape took place, where, and who was with the girl at that time. Focusing on these details contributes to building up a climate which is anti-woman, in which the woman is blamed for the rape. Men in the media need to look at the core issue of women’s safety in public spaces, not go into these details.

The flip side of this is that once the victim of violence is identified as being from the NE, it is automatically concluded that the reason is ‘racial discrimination’. Male victims too get bracketed under this broad category. Once this phrase is used, said Chitra, the media starts salivating. But often the issue is not one of racial discrimination. Often violence against NE women is because of being targeted as women. The media in Manipur is no different from the mainstream media in the way it reports sexual violence, said Chitra. Referring to the incident of the molestation of the actress in Manipur by Livingstone Anal, leader of the NSCN (IM), an overground militant group in Manipur, she said that he was technically not even supposed to be in the state. The Manipur press used very sensational descriptions of the molestation, some even likening her to a ‘modern-day Draupadi’.

Chitra also mentioned that her English-medium newspaper is read by just 2,000 people, but the local language papers are read by the masses. They need to be monitored. When a rape takes place, a Joint Action Committee (JAC) is formed, and then some group calls a press conference where they say that the JAC took the victim for a medical test, disclosing her name. The activists involved in following up these rape incidents are not aware of the rules regarding not naming or identifying rape victims. A media watch must be kept on the language media and the coverage in this media must be addressed.

Chitra suggested that there was a great need for more constructive partnerships between the local, national and regional media so that the hurdles of distance and language which hinder reportage of the NE are overcome. “There are so many things happening here which don’t get highlighted,” she said. “Had there been a national consciousness created by the media when the Manorama murder happened, it would have been easier to bring out subsequent incidents.”

C Vanaja divided her presentation into three areas: the civil war in Chhattisgarh and the internal displaced persons as a result; the SEZ in Polepally, Andhra Pradesh, and the movement for a separate Telangana. Vanaja has written and filmed on all these issues.

The civil war in Chhattisgarh

In March 2005, Vanaja travelled to regions dominated by Maoists and filmed the Janatana Sarkar (people’s government) run by them. Her documentary was aired by CNN-IBN. At that time, the region was peaceful. But in May 2005, the Salwa Judum campaign against the Maoists started and the entire region changed. Villages were burnt, women raped, and many persons killed. No FIRs were registered. Only a few cases of rape were taken cognisance of, thanks to the efforts of people like Prof Nandini Sunder from Delhi who moved higher courts against the Salwa Judum. This violence has continued for the last eight years. The characteristic feature of Salwa Judum is that groups of 150 armed tribals go to villages suspected to be sympathetic to Maoists and set them on fire. The villagers run away into the forests, and those that do not, are taken to camps.

Vanaja has been visiting the region since then both as a reporter and as a member of fact finding teams. She pointed out the way in which women are specifically targeted in this conflict. The Maoists and the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sanghatana fought for and won the ‘right’ for adivasi women to wear blouses after marriage. Hence any blouse-wearing married adivasi is seen as sympathetic to the Maoists and targeted by the Salwa Judum. In the civil war that has followed, at least one lakh people have crossed the borders. They suffer malnutrition, they are hunted, their settlements burnt. Women and children suffer the most in this conflict. Rape and murder are used as weapons.

Vanaja showed a picture of about eight women sitting in a row, all of them wearing blouses, whom she had met while making her documentary in 2005. Some of them were raped and killed during the Salwa Judum. Even the village that she had visited had been burnt down during Salwa Judum. As in Kashmir and the NE, rape is used as a weapon in Chhattisgarh too, said Vanaja. SRP Kalluri, who was awarded a gallantry award this Republic Day, has used rape systematically to terrorise Adivasi women. Vanaja cited the instance of a two-year-old who cried when any stranger approached her mother, because the child had seen policemen led by Kalluri rape the mother at the police station.

The terror spread by Kalluri is such that when Vanaja went to meet people in the area as part of a fact finding team in March 2007, she was advised that it was not safe to be travelling around. This campaign is hardly covered by the local or national media. The media, she said, is absent or hardly present. There are no Adivasi journalists in that tribal-dominated area and no one to report from their point of view.

The SEZ in Polepally

The second case study was of a small village’s struggle against an SEZ which they ultimately lost. The villagers, most of them Dalits, had small land holdings which sustained them but these were sought to be taken away for the SEZ. They were given a pittance as compensation – Rs 18,000 was assigned but only Rs 10,000 came in their hands as corrupt officers pocketed the remaining amount. The land was sold at Rs 22 lakh per acre; Jagan Mohan Reddy was accused of quid pro quo in this deal because the land was actually worth Rs 45 lakh per acre. He was sent to jail for mediating for half the price. But the women, who took the initiative and fought for four years went on a hunger strike and had police dogs set upon them, were the real losers.

Vanaja recalled her meeting with one woman who was working on a piece of land as a labourer. She broke down and told her, “This was my land.” In the four years of the struggle, the village saw 80 men dying of heart attacks. The village is now one of widows and men who have taken to drinking. Again, the media was indifferent to the direct and indirect violence faced by the people. It was reported in bits and pieces, but there was no investigation or follow-up.

In Telangana

The third case study was of the struggle for Telangana. Unlike the first two, this movement got wide media coverage. The Osmania University students triggered the movement in 2009. For three months, the police lathi-charged them almost every alternate day. Here too, the girls took the lead in the protests, thinking that the police would hesitate to lathi-charge a morcha led by girls. This worked initially, but later, the girls too had to face lathis. The media persons covering the lathi-charge were also beaten. The AP media is not neutral on Telangana – it is either for or against. It has therefore had to face assaults from both the police and the activists. For instance, a woman journalist working with Namaste Telangana, a pro-Telangana media house, was beaten up badly while covering the agitation.

All her work, Vanaja said, raised a number of questions, including the issue of how to define ‘balance’ in coverage and in reporting. Often, there were questions from the other side about whether a reporter was pro-Naxalite, or anti-development but with the gravity of the situation and the pathetic plight of the people, she felt it was difficult to take a neutral stand.

Freny Manecksha spoke of her ‘long journey’ from being a ‘desk’ person to an independent reporter who began covering Chhattisgarh and Orissa over the last few years. She said these zones were highly militarised and it was a challenge to even move around here. It was difficult to know who to approach or where to start. In fact, she was told to contact the infamous Kalluri if she had any problem. In 2010, outsiders were not to be spoken to. There were 27 publications in Chhattisgarh, mostly in Hindi, and these reflected the business interests of the owners, who had close links with the mining industry. The journalists who work here often have to bring in advertisements from the companies in the region, so that makes it impossible for them to do any substantial reporting.

While the civil administration wants to keep outside reporters away from the Maoist zones, when it wants to, it sees to it that journalists are embedded. When 76 CRPF men were killed by Maoists in Chhattisgarh in April 2010, the administration was so eager to have journalists visit that they were even willing to fly the latter to the CRPF camp. In such a situation, how do you, as an independent journalist, go in and record the actual voices of Adivasis, she asked.

There are two real difficulties here, said Freny. One is the terrain; the other is that Adivasis don’t have a chronology of time the way we do, so they relate events not to dates but to other events. So all known norms of journalism – like dates and facts – go for a toss. How then do you remain true to what took place? What Freny decided to do is listen to the people’s narratives and look at the larger picture of militarisation.

She found that the story is actually very layered and complex. It’s not only what the state agencies and non-state agencies are doing there. There’s also the fact that these two states — Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand — have been created for the tribals who form the majority, but are ruled by non-tribals. The story is what this has done to the tribals there. She gave an example of four adivasis who were labelled as Maoists. Two were shot dead and two jailed. The villagers gave vague replies that they had gone in search of a missing cow. But finally, the truth came out – they had gone hunting for scrap. That, felt Freny, was the real story, that the Adivasis who are the original inhabitants of this area, and who made their living from the forests, are now being ousted from their lands and being forced to hunt for scrap to make a living. Then they are labelled as Maoists and shot dead.

In fact there is a total collapse of the criminal justice system in Chhattisgarh where the jails are full of Adivasis labelled as Maoists, waiting endlessly for their trials to begin. The Chhattisgarh Public Security Act defines a Maoist very vaguely. The State has created a ‘security-centric’ blanket over the region, and it is based on the premise that anyone who the State describes as a Maoist has no rights. The trouble is that journalists go with this premise.

All this has resulted in the criminalisation of dissent. “So if I am an Adivasi who doesn’t want to move out of my land, I’m labelled a Maoist,” she said.

A similar pattern is seen in Orissa, said Freny. She covered the anti-Posco protests, the Kalinganagar agitation against Tata Steel, and the fallout of the anti-Christian riots of Kandhamal. “In all these places, if you don’t buy into what the government tells you, you are seen as anti-national,” she said. The region where POSCO is putting up its plant is not a Naxalite area. “But cases have been foisted on entire villages.

The government can put down all mass struggles simply by using this word. We have to reflect on how many rights we are losing in the garb of fighting Maoism,” she said.

Dilnaz Boga, a Mumbai-based journalist who worked in Kashmir valley for a year, said that when she moved to Kashmir, she had to unlearn everything she had learnt as a reporter in Mumbai for 14 years. This was 2010, a very violent period in the recent history of Kashmir, when unarmed protestors were being shot on the streets. The youngest was just eight years old. He had run out of his house during curfew. There was non-stop curfew for six to eight months that year and curfew went on for prolonged periods of at least 35-40 days.

So how does a reporter operate in a militarised zone? First, said Dilnaz, because of the violence, there was very little physical access to distant places. Dilnaz covered the street protests in Srinagar which were fired on, and the funerals of those who were shot dead, which were also fired on. There were as many as three funerals a day. She saw security forces firing on ambulances carrying the dead.

As a reporter, said Dilnaz, you are there with the people on the street. It becomes very difficult to stay detached. You are part of the people at that time. When you shoot a picture of someone being beaten up by a policeman, the security forces turn on you.

The second problem is of getting facts and figures. The State and its agencies do not volunteer information and maintain that everything is fine, even though you can hear gunshots. In Mumbai, reporters ring up the police and get the facts. There, the administration says nothing’s going on even though over the phone, talking to them, you can hear shots being fired. When the incidents of firing began getting too many, the administration started sending press notes. Even possessing a curfew pass doesn’t guarantee you access. At one point, the entire press colony was cordoned off.

Dilnaz worked for a website which needed to be updated, but verifying information became difficult. She (and other Kashmiri journalists) then started finding other ways to get facts. One source became the doctors in hospitals around the valley – and journalists started cultivating them as regular sources of information to verify news and to get to know how many people had actually been shot dead and how many injured.

The local media are under pressure – the Home Department wants to see their front page before it was printed. Editors are often made to remove certain stories from pages at the last minute. The government even forbade them from carrying news of the Arab Spring protests in Egypt in the entire valley because it could lead to ‘inciting’ the population. But the national media on the other hand, is given red carpet treatment constantly and are under no such constraints. They are given access to places where the local media isn’t. No one chases them or cocks their guns at them, so they get just one side of the story.

Surveillance of everyone, especially the media, was very high with phone lines tapped and e-mails monitored. Dilnaz revealed that the website she worked for was hacked. While the police claimed it was hacked by Pakistanis, computer experts found out that it had been hacked by Indian intelligence agencies. But this was not as scary as stories disappearing from her desktop, where she would store them for easy access. She then learnt to store her data on external drives, keeping her computer ‘squeaky clean’.

Every year, said Dilnaz, ‘tourism stories’ appear in the mainstream media, tracing the rise in the number of tourists to the Valley. That is state propaganda, she said. Countering this is the very active social media in the valley; videos of unarmed students and women being beaten up, of troopers breaking window panes, are uploaded onto You Tube. Thus the emergence of social media has helped in exchanging information and people have begun shooting videos and sharing them and uploading them later. There are lots of attacks on journalists but these are not reported sufficiently, she said. This climate breeds self-censorship.

In 2010, Dilnaz managed to interview the leader running the protest movement. He was underground, with the police looking for him. Her editor wasn’t willing to carry the interview, so she sold it to a foreign publication. After it appeared, the intelligence agencies asked her for the audio-tape, but she told them there was none.

In such an environment, said Dilnaz, sometimes journalists may get hit by a stone, or the CRPF may shove you around. But you have to tell the story. As a woman journalist, you have to be aware of and constantly negotiate ‘militarised masculinities’ in that area.

The four reports were followed by an intervention by Anjulika Thingnam of Manipur. Anjulika spoke about getting across the story of the woman who has nothing to do with the conflict raging in her area, but gets caught in it only because she is married either to a militant or a policeman. When her husband is killed, what is the impact on her? Conflict is inducing young women to become sex workers in Manipur. The state of Manipur is as big as Mumbai and very close knit. When a woman is displaced, she goes to live with her relatives. When a reporter goes to visit displaced families, the first thing that’s asked of the reporter is: How can you help? To that, the reporter has no answer, because she’s only telling her story. When a woman is raped either by the security forces or by militants of another ethnic group, Joint Action Committees are formed to fight for her rights. But in that fight, the woman herself is forgotten.

No proper survey has been done on how many women have been widowed in Manipur. One estimate is that 300 men aged between 18 and 36 die in a year. What happens to their widows? The general perception is that they run away or elope. If they do remain in the family, they are socially excluded, not allowed to be part of any family celebration.

There is very little gender awareness in Manipur. The women who are widowed are termed ‘collateral damage’. Militants say, “There is a war going on in Manipur against the State. Talk of gender and environment is a conspiracy to divert the struggle of self-determination.” So how does one write about these women?

The question also arises, why should only women write about women? Why can’t men do so too? Manipuri women journalists came up with the idea of instituting a ‘gender award’ for journalists, to induce men to start writing about women. It actually worked to sensitise men.

Anjulika cited the incident where a woman was wandering around the streets delirious and hallucinating. Anjulika took her to a centre and it was decided that an announcement would be made asking her family to come and take her. But the male journalists objected, asking what if she had run away from her family, because there was something wrong going on there? That was a first (experience) for us, said Anjulika.

The question of ‘balance’

In the question-answer session that followed, the question of ‘balance’ was brought up—how do journalists maintain a balance while reporting from conflict areas? Vanaja had mentioned in her talk that she was often asked: What about Naxalite violence? “I can’t be neutral,” was her reply. Naxalite violence is being reported all the time; victims of Naxalite violence are being paid compensation too. As journalists, she said, it’s our duty to bring out the violence of the State. The violence of the Maoists gets Page One banner headlines. But when Maoists are killed, the report is placed somewhere inside. Seven children were among 19 tribals killed in a fake encounter last year; this got little attention. Nor was the violence of the Salwa Judum. But when 17 CRPF men were killed, we even came to know their names. So it’s our duty to bring the other story to light, she said.

Freny too had spoken about the question of ‘balance’. She felt journalists had to see the situation in Chhattisgarh and Orissa in its totality. This is now a conflict area. On both sides, the players are poor. The CRPF men are also poor. But the question to ask is: What are they doing here? Why do we need to send them in to kill Adivasis? Why is the Naga Battalion in Chhattisgarh? Why can’t their expertise be used constructively in Nagaland?

The ultimate question that needs to be answered by the media is: What does militarisation mean? Answering the question in the discussion, Freny said that if she was given overwhelming evidence of State atrocities, she wasn’t going to go around looking for instances of Maoist violence. She had been told by a Cobra (‘Commando Battalion for Resolute Action’) commander that she didn’t talk about his men who were facing mines every day. Ultimately she said, the question was of the role of the State. Militants have never given any promise of accountability, but the State has a covenant to act according to the Constitution.

Dilnaz felt that the mainstream media was covering that aspect of the conflict (militant violence) anyway. She was more concerned about the human issues. Kashmir had the highest suicide rate because it had the highest level of militarisation. “I would rather look at what no one else is looking at,” she said. Dilnaz recounted how when she had tried to send a report about the situation there to the mainstream press, one editor had told her, “In Kashmir you expect this to happen. Send some happy stories.” Given this attitude, Dilnaz said, “I’m doing a service to this nation by telling these stories.”

Chitra and Anjulika however, had a different point of view. Their first priority was to get news into the mainstream media, which blanks out the NE completely unless there’s something sensational. Even the three-month-long economic blockade imposed by a militant group which cut off all essential supplies to Manipur in 2011 was not reported by the mainstream media. When CNN-IBN eventually decided to cover it, they finally didn’t run the story because at the last minute, a plane somewhere went off a tarmac and that made more news. First the personnel of the Assam Rifles, and now the Manipuri Police Commandos have been raping women in the name of fighting counter insurgency movements, and getting away with it because of the impunity given to them by AFSPA. Getting this reported has been nearly impossible. The mainstream media has begun talking about it only now, after the Justice Verma Committee report. However, Chitra said, the Manipuri media has found non-State actors as oppressive as the State. They can be as vicious, sending parcel bombs to journalists.

Susan Abraham pointed out how the media ignores conflict issues in urban areas. In Mumbai, huge sections of the population are affected by slum demolitions. The conflict is so ‘in your face’, but none of it finds a place in the Mumbai media. Another example is the condition of women in Mumbai’s jails. This isn’t covered at all. Someone wondered whether the old concept of ‘objectivity’ was necessary any longer. It was seen as an impossibility. Today, it was more about being fair and impartial.

Rapporteurs for the session: Jyoti Punwani, Geeta Seshu