A murder and a wake-up call

The Indian media today stands discredited as rarely before in recent history. At best it is ridiculed, at worst regarded with contempt. As happened during the infamous Emergency, today the Indian media’s grit and courage to speak out is best forgotten. As a result it is bashed both by the establishment and the Opposition. Journalists are trolled, ridiculed, abused, vilified, and some women journalists are even threatened with rape and worse on the social media.

The worst has happened in the cold-blooded murder of the editor of Gauri Lankesh Patrike , Gauri Lankesh, a firebrand and fearless journalist-activist in Bengaluru. A known leftist and rationalist who was bitterly against the ideology of the far right, Gauri had expressed her fears often enough against the shrinking space for dissent, the disintegration of a secular India and the attacks on freedom of expression. After the murder of MM Kalburgi, the eminent Kannada scholar and rationalist, outside his home in Dharwad in a strikingly similar fashion, she had reportedly told a friend — quoted in BBC News — that she too was getting death threats from right-wing Hindu groups but “I don’t care what happens to me, they even called me a slut. But I really worry for the country. These guys will break it up”.

Of course it is foolhardy to point fingers in any direction without conclusive proof. Gauri had no qualms about her left leanings and had even “adopted” the JNU firebrand Kanhaiya Kumar. Her activism included advocacy for getting justice for tribals, farmers and forest-dwellers, and she had managed to convince a few Naxal activists to give up arms and join the mainstream.

In the process she had made enemies of several Naxalite bigwigs who heaped abuse on her. The shock is bigger because in the last few years, other rationalists/intellectuals who expressed their opinions freely and fearlessly, such as Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare, have been shot dead in a chillingly similar fashion.

The spontaneous outpouring of grief and outrage, though welcome, are not enough. There is a deeper malaise in the Indian media which needs to be addressed as it is fast losing the characteristics that once defined it as largely fair, free and fearless. As more and more media houses and journalists “fall in line” and the larger body of journalists stops doing its job, it has become easier to pick out and eliminate bold and harshly critical voices. Pitiably, along with the outrage and grief, there were also voices on the social media gloating over her Gauri’s murder. While some had the temerity to point out more names that needed to go the same way — it should make us pause and wonder why most of these names on the wishlist of bloodthirsty twitterati were female — one particular message, since deleted, used disgusting words such as ek kuttiya ke marne se, kutte ki maut (a bitch died; dog’s death), etc.

But any amount of outrage is not going to bring back the life that was cruelly snuffed out. Just think about it — a 55-year-old woman returns home from work to be shot at point-blank range in the heart of a buzzing city like Bengaluru. And we talk about journalists who go to war zones such as Syria or Yemen, or those who write against the drug mafia in Mexico, being at risk! Barely a fortnight back, the murder of another journalist, Ram Chandra Chhatrapati, who first brought to light the nefarious activities of Gurmeet Ram Rahim, was remembered when the fake godman was convicted.

The mirror that Gauri’s murder holds up before all of us in the Indian media is both scary and ugly, and raises an important question. Is the Indian media really playing the role of watchdog, is it doing an honest job? The answer is a resounding no. In the US, the media which is held in such contempt by President Donald Trump, is fighting back. There are enough voices questioning both his politics and policies, and more. But the Indian media is losing its credibility by not questioning the establishment, not only at the Centre, but in the States as well.

It is a real pity that those who acted with revulsion when MOS for External Affairs V K Singh so distastefully called mediapersons ‘presstitutes’, are now using the same term to describe journalists for the opposite reason. He had used this derogatory term for his own critics and those of the NDA government. But now this horrible expression has gained currency, along with adjectives such as bikao or paid media, for not being critical enough of the establishment.

As someone wrote, Gauri Lankesh was killed for doing her job because we don’t do ours. Can we deny this?

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