Journalists condemn intimidation by Gujarat government

>From Indo-Asian News Service

New Delhi, Mar 9 (IANS) The Gujarat government not only connived at and
collaborated with the Hindu hooligans in the attack on Muslims in the state
but also sought to cover up the incidents by intimidating the media, senior
editors and journalists who covered the communal violence charged Saturday.

And, speaking on "Media, the state and Gujarat" at the Press Club of India
here, they rejected the charge by the state government and Prime Minister
Atal Bihari Vajpayee that the media had exaggerated the violence.

But they acknowledged that perhaps restraint should have been exercised,
particularly by the television channels, in showing the horrendous killing
that left nearly 700 people dead in a week of communal frenzy.

They warned that the "story of Gujarat is not over" because, as one
journalist put it, "the bad men are still in position."

The fact that the media had been criticised for the coverage was a testimony
to the fact that it had done a good job in the face of an "extraordinary
attack on the profession," said Vinod Mehta, editor-in-chief of Outlook
weekly.

"Had it not been for the media, the army would have continued to stand by
and police continued to look for direction," he said, adding the media's job
was to "tell the story from the side of the victims" and that was what it
did by and large, he added.

Dileep Padgaonkar, executive managing editor of The Times of India, termed
Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi's claim that but for the media
reportage everything was fine in his state as "terminal smugness."

"We are dealing with a mindset which is intrinsically authoritarian," he
said while urging the media to do some introspection.

He said the Editors' Guild should go into the question whether reporters
indulged in ideological partisanship in reporting the events in the state,
should the need to restore normalcy take precedence over accurate reporting,
whether the media should refrain from identifying the communities involved
in the clashes so as not to incite passions and whether the English-language
press is "anti-Hindu," as alleged by some Hindu leaders.

Harish Khare, associate editor of The Hindu newspaper, said it was not the
English papers but some Gujarati language papers that had played a prominent
role in instigating violence. Over the years, the Gujarat papers have
developed a "conservative, anti-minority, and anti-Dalit" character, he
said. Dalits form the lowest rank in caste-conscious Hindu society.

Alok Mehta of Dainik Bhaskar, a Hindi language paper, in a reference to
leaders of Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), said those who had
fought against the imposition of the state of emergency by then prime
minister Indira Gandhi in 1975 were behaving exactly like the government of
those days.

"If we do not fight the trends, our plight will be the same as that of
Pakistan and the society will be Talibanised," he said.

Prabhash Joshi of Janasatta, another Hindi daily, said the Indian media
could be proud of the way it had covered the developments in Gujarat.

Journalists from television channels described how the Gujarat government
had sought to intimidate them to prevent them from showing the violence.

Rajdeep Sardesai of NDTV said he had not driven ten minutes after
interviewing Chief Minister Modi at his residence when he saw a vehicle with
eight people "roasted alive inside" and a mob told him and his crew to chant
pro-Hindu slogans. "If anyone of you are a Muslim, you will make my day," he
quoted one in the mob as saying.

-Indo-Asian News Service